Bump bytecode with Deserialized literal

[tisonkun]

#!/usr/bin/env perl6

say "hello world";

If we compile the code snip above into bytecode and then bump it, in the bump info we cannot find "hello world" literal. I propose to keep this info by comment, think of how javap does

public class Main {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("hello world");
  }
}

...
Constant pool:
   #1 = Methodref          #6.#15         // java/lang/Object."<init>":()V
   #2 = Fieldref           #16.#17        // java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream;
   #3 = String             #18            // hello world
...

[jnthn]

Rakudo doesn't code-gen a string literal in Perl 6 as a MoarVM string literal, but rather as wval fetching a boxed Str object holding that string literal. The bytecode dump does dump string literals (take a look at any findmeth or const_s instruction). Note that if you were to use the Rakudo JVM backend and look at the generated bytecode, you'd not see the literal in the generated code for that Perl 6 program either, for the same reason.

Objects are held in a serialized blob. We can't deserialize it without having its dependencies available (to provide the required metadata to know how to deserialize a Str), but the --dump option is intended to work only on a single bytecode file without running anything in it.

One useful thing we could provide is a way to ask the debug server for the bytecode once the program is running, and when much more information is available.

[tisonkun]

close as no longer interested in.