Why not just fix PASM/PIR?
We can’t really fix PASM in place because we have conflicting needs: We simultaneously need to extend it in order to match all the power of C, and shrink it to make it easier to analyze, optimize and JIT compile it. What we would end up doing is growing PASM to include what I now think of as being “L1”, and then we would need to shrink away most of what we now think of as being “PASM”, and we would be essentially left with only L1. Keep in mind that this is not necessarily a bad development path for us to follow, but the end result is L1, not what we currently know as PASM. We can start by creating an op library for the new L1 ops, start transitioning everything over to use them, and then start deprecating away our old PIR ops (or rewriting them in terms of L1). What remains at the end of this is the small selection of L1 ops and various HLLs (I’m including PIR/PASM here as an HLL) which compile to L1, and L1 is executed directly by Parrot.
