Is HiPE faster than the Beam emulator?

[Kostis Sagonas]

Roger Price asked:

 > Should HiPE be faster than the BEAM emulator?

Short answer due to the use of "should": Yes ;-)

Unfortunately, the version of HiPE distributed with the R8
emulator is not always.  Also, I suspect that your machine
is an x86, right?  The x86 port of HiPE was at a preliminary
stage last October.

Since then, we have been working on HiPE and the newer versions
are much better.  The upcoming R9 release will contain these
and the x86 port of HiPE is now complete.

Still, we will make no claims for guaranteed performance
improvements, although I will be surprised if you do not
notice some in applications where all the frequently
executed code is compiled to native code.  Mode-switches
(i.e. BEAM <-> HiPE switches) still have an overhead though.

Best,
Kostis