Reia: now fully compiled (and sometimes JITed)

One of the most frequent questions I get about Reia is its execution model. Is it a simple parse tree walker? Is it interpreted? Is it compiled?

The old branch of Reia made extensive use of the Erlang metacircular interpreter, which is a parse tree walker. Any code within models or classes, however, was compiled to Erlang bytecode. Reia did autodetect HiPE (the Erlang native code compiler/JIT) when available, and would use it when compiling modules/classes.

The new branch of Reia does not make use of the Erlang metacircular interpreter at all. Instead all code, including any code which is eval'd, is translated into Erlang then compiled by the Erlang compiler. This means Reia is 100% fully compiled, and will compile to native code when your Erlang interpreter supports it.

"AutoHiPE" is off by default for now, if only because HiPE has a slightly greater startup time than the normal BEAM interpreter.

HiPE has some additional problems as well. It has limited platform support. x86-64 is not one of the supported platforms. Given that BEAM is fundamentally a register machine you think it'd be ripe for compilation to native code via something like LLVM.

But for now, enjoy native code compilation on the platforms that support it by passing {autohipe, true} as a compiler option.