I remember years ago when Java adjacent research was all the rage, HP had a problem that was “Rosetta lite” if you will. They had a need to run old binaries on new hardware that wasn’t exactly backward compatible. They made a transpiler that worked on binaries. It might have even been a JIT but that part of the memory is fuzzy.

What made it interesting here was that as a sanity check they made an A->A mode where they took in one architecture and spit out machine code for the same architecture. The output was faster than the input. Meaning that even native code has some room for improvement with JIT technology.

I have been wishing for years that we were in a better place with regard to compilers and NP complete problems where the compilers had a fast mode for code-build-test cycles and a very slow incremental mode for official builds. I recall someone telling me the only thing they liked about the Rational IDE (C and C++?) was that it cached precompiled headers, one of the Amdahl’s Law areas for compilers. If you changed a header, you paid the recompilation cost and everyone else got a copy. I love whenever the person that cares about something gets to pay the consequence instead of externalizing it on others.

And having some CI machines or CPUs that just sit around chewing on Hard Problems all day for that last 10% seems to be to be a really good use case in a world that’s seeing 16 core consumer hardware. Also caching hints from previous runs is a good thing.