Has anyone ever attempted AOT instead of JIT?

[Nintonito]

(02-21-2015, 01:40 AM)Fiora Wrote: Dolphin's JIT is incredibly fast; the time spent in it is hard to measure with typical profiling tools because it's basically a rounding error. If you were using a vastly more heavyweight compiler, maybe it could be an issue?

A tracing JIT definitely sounds like an interesting idea, but on a system that can arbitrarily swap out code in memory, the question of "what do I do to a trace when part of it gets invalidated" could be difficult. Plus, code size is already a big problem, and tracing JITs are known for that.

It's not impossible though; I do really like the idea of tracing as an approach. The first tracing JIT ever was actually for emulation/recompilation, not for compiling an existing language, despite the commonness of tracing JITs in Javascript and such today.

So the feeling I'm getting is that its a waste of time because the code won't be any faster,  unless the CPU emulator was someone completely rewritten with a tracer in mind.  Makes sense.  I guess i sort of underestimated the speed of the existing JIT.  Still,  tracer JIT's are a wonderful concept,  and I kinda wish we saw more of them (I personally would be willing to trade disk/ram space for a worthwhile speed up.  Especially since I have all this RAM in my computer that never gets used.)