Is it time to go stackless?

As a follow-up on Guy Steele's post on tail recursion referenced on my last one and Cook's paper, there's another interesting post by Gilad Bracha that made me wonder: is it time to go stackless?

The stack, as an optimization for call convention is deeply rooted into greatly extended instruction sets. But now, with the amounts of RAM and CPU power available and the really cheap short-lived object allocation time in modern VMs, I think we could afford it, at least for high level languages.

Back in my Python days, I remember Stackless Python, an implementation of this programming language with support for continuations, generators and coroutines.

And this would be only the beginning...

Tail calls in OOLs

Yesterday's paper is also related to a very interesting post by Guy L. Steele Jr. on the need of tail calls on object-oriented languages. A rather polemic issue with strong proponents (such as Guy) and detractors, like Guido Van Rossum, Python's creator.

I'm sure more interesting contributions will follow.

Readings on Dec 6th 2009

Today's reading has been "On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited" by William R. Cook. It has really been an eye-opener on the differences between abstract data types and objects, and it have helped me  understand the implication of the different approaches taken by different programming languages.

Highly recommended.