[MacRuby-devel] experimental branch: status update

Laurent Sansonetti lsansonetti at apple.com
Sun Apr 12 23:01:17 PDT 2009


Another week, another status update on the experimental branch!  
Unfortunately, the work done this week was pretty light.

- More work on IO (IO#readlines, IO#each_byte and IO#each_char).

- A better implementation for catch/throw was added.

- Tail-call elimination was introduced. This optimization transforms  
recursive calls into local loops, in order to prevent stack overflows.  
As an example, the following code snippet works on the experimental  
branch, but doesn't on trunk (or the regular Ruby implementation).

$ ./miniruby -e "def f(n); return if n == 0; f(n-1); end; f(1000000)"

In order to benefit of this optimization, the recursive call must be  
performed at the very end of one of the function's blocks, which means  
the programmer will most likely need to rewrite his algorithms.

- Symbol comparisons (#==, #!= and #===) are now inlined if both  
operands are constants. The bm_vm2_case.rb benchmark is now running  
faster than YARV.

$ ruby b.rb benchmark/bm_vm2_case.rb
benchmark/bm_vm2_case.rb
MacRuby version 0.5 (ruby 1.9.0) [universal-darwin9.5, x86_64]
     0.20079
     0.202569
     0.210689
ruby 1.9.1 (2008-12-28 patchlevel-5000 trunk 21107) [i386-darwin9.5.0]
     0.680986
     0.676041
     0.679767

A funny fact that we discovered during this change was that Ruby 1.9  
does not check if #=== has been overwritten in case symbols are used  
in a case expression. http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/1376

- A new JIT compilation strategy was developed, which basically  
compiles methods at the very last moment, right before the runtime  
actually needs them. The strategy is now mostly stable modulo 1 bug  
that I still need to investigate and fix, which is why it is not  
enabled by default. If you want to play with it, you need to enable  
the ROXOR_ULTRA_LAZY_JIT constant in roxor.cpp.

- Vincent started working on a spec regarding 1.9 string encodings!

- The LLVM IR interpreter was investigated in order to interpret  
faster #eval expressions. The result of this investigation has been  
committed and works pretty well with simple expressions, however it is  
not activated by default yet because of limitations when it comes to  
call the VM primitives. We will have to modify the LLVM interpreter a  
little bit in order to fully use it from MacRuby. This will be done in  
the near future.

- The parsing process has been accelerated, principally we are doing  
much less IOs and creating much less temporary objects.

As a result of a few of these changes (lazy JIT + new parsing  
process), IRB starts a little less than 2 times faster on the machine  
I'm using to write this message.

$ time ./miniruby_old -I./lib bin/irb -v
irb 0.9.5(05/04/13)

real	0m1.790s
user	0m1.586s
sys	0m0.278s

$ time ./miniruby -I./lib bin/irb -v
irb 0.9.5(05/04/13)

real	0m0.980s
user	0m0.941s
sys	0m0.114s

While this is a good progress, this is still not acceptable and the  
startup time should be decreased by another 50% at the very least.  
Hopefully there are still numerous things that we can do to achieve  
this goal.

Laurent


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