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The node server

The node server does a fairly simple job: It receives a chunk of code, and the data this code needs for its computations, executes the code, and returns the result.

In the node server, the focus is on the virtual machine. The virtual machine must be efficient. Even though the language provides instructions that can do fairly complex (i.e. computationally expensive) operations, like matrix multiplication, there will be cases where we need to execute a larger number of instructions to complete some simple task. There is a constant overhead in the virtual machine for executing an instruction, no matter which instruction. This overhead is mainly

The Fibonacci number calculation program which will be introduced in Section 5.2 is an extreme example that almost does no real work but has it's execution speed limited only by the number of instructions that are executed (not the work they do).

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Next: The language Up: Designing the system Previous: Keeping everyone busy   Contents

1999-08-09