Comment by zackmorris

This is really interesting, and I'm surprised that I had never looked at JIT compiling as self-modifying code (SMC). Also that I had never heard of copy-and-patch.

There are whole classes of problems that can be more easily solved with SMC. That's part of what got me into FPGAs back in the 90s, before I abandoned them due to their lack of exponential growth and proprietary placement and routing tools.

This could have implications for faster in-app scripting like in games. Also for building more powerful shaders. I wonder if there are analogs of the article's mprotect(ret, 256, PROT_READ | PROT_EXEC) calls for GPUs.