Graydon pointed me at a
paper on context threading, a somewhat different way to organize
an interpreter. It is a nice trick — subroutine threading with a
twist, or a baby step toward JITting. It is a way to avoid trashing
the pipeline, which happens in an ordinary interpreter due to all the
unpredictable branching. Unfortunately I don’t think this would work
well for gij, due to the way we handle exceptions; a problem that also
affects most of the JITs we’ve considered embedding. Andrew has
talked occasionally of changing our exception handling approach, that
is looking more and more necessary.

Java Language Future

Here’s the
presentation on the future of the Java Language that I saw part of
while I was in Brazil. It is interesting for the most part. The XML
bits are fairly weird.