7. Future Work

We are currently investigating the use of boxed values [13] as implemented in the interpreted Napier88/Octopus system [8]. We believe that the use of boxed values will permit lazy code, as described in Section 3.7, to be generated in many more cases than is currently possible. Whether or not this proves to be an optimisation remains to be seen.

We are currently assembling Napier88 systems that will permit us to compare swizzled and directly mapped store technologies. The system under construction will support independent configuration of the following options:

• whether the store is directly mapped with page granularity, or swizzled with object granularity;
• whether the code in the store is native code or interpreted PAM code;
• whether the code in the store uses the Octopus model [8] or the original PAM frame model [4]; and
• whether the system will run on the Sun SPARC architecture or the DEC Alpha AXP architecture.

We plan to measure the performance of the OO7 benchmark [3] under all combinations of the above options, comparing object-swizzled and page-mapped stores.