Editing Interpreter (computing) (section)

===Template Interpreter===
Making the distinction between compilers and interpreters yet again even more vague is a special interpreter design known as a template interpreter. Rather than implement the execution of code by virtue of a large switch statement containing every possible bytecode, while operating on a software stack or a tree walk, a template interpreter maintains a large array of bytecode (or any efficient intermediate representation) mapped directly to corresponding native machine instructions that can be executed on the host hardware as key value pairs (or in more efficient designs, direct addresses to the native instructions),<ref name="auto">{{cite web|url=https://github.com/openjdk/jdk|title=openjdk/jdk|website=GitHub|date=18 November 2021}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://openjdk.java.net/groups/hotspot/docs/RuntimeOverview.html#Interpreter |title=HotSpot Runtime Overview |publisher=Openjdk.java.net |date= |accessdate=2022-08-06}}</ref> known as a "Template". When the particular code segment is executed the interpreter simply loads or jumps to the opcode mapping in the template and directly runs it on the hardware.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://metebalci.com/blog/demystifying-the-jvm-jvm-variants-cppinterpreter-and-templateinterpreter/|title=Demystifying the JVM: JVM Variants, Cppinterpreter and TemplateInterpreter|website=metebalci.com}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=JVM template interpreter|website=ProgrammerSought|url=https://programmersought.com/article/5521858566/}}</ref> Due to its design, the template interpreter very strongly resembles a just-in-time compiler rather than a traditional interpreter, however it is technically not a JIT due to the fact that it merely translates code from the language into native calls one opcode at a time rather than creating optimized sequences of CPU executable instructions from the entire code segment. Due to the interpreter's simple design of simply passing calls directly to the hardware rather than implementing them directly, it is much faster than every other type, even bytecode interpreters, and to an extent less prone to bugs, but as a tradeoff is more difficult to maintain due to the interpreter having to support translation to multiple different architectures instead of a platform independent virtual machine/stack. To date, the only template interpreter implementations of widely known languages to exist are the interpreter within Java's official reference implementation, the Sun HotSpot Java Virtual Machine,<ref name="auto"/> and the Ignition Interpreter in the Google V8 javascript execution engine.