Where to next with Exupery?

Tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Sat May 14 23:03:04 UTC 2005


> It's a source for benchmarks, I could also borrow them from other
> places. But what I'm interested in is benchmarks with a practical
> benefit to the Squeak community.
>
There is a fairly sizable set of benchmarks on SM. Like any BMs they are of
limited use but at least its a common set that exercises a very large part of
the system. The nice thing about big benchmarks is that they rapidly deflate
ones fantasies about how a tiny tweak will be a huge win. :-(  They do however
nicely justify careful work to make gradual improvements.

If you have made serious gains in send/return performance without compromising
performance of many processes (think Tweak) then that would be very interesting
to find a way to get into the mainline VM. Likewise a faster prim activation
(I've already made the prim dispatch about as fast as a not-inlined PMC can be,
I think) sequence would be a general win.

I suspect many prims could be made faster with some effort in better control
flow and less (ab)use of success: etc. Some important prims could be written in
pseudocode suitable for your translator so that they could be inlined and avoid
the primcalling glue altogether. VW uses this to good effect.

And of course you have to make it all work nicely on ARM cpus or a substantial
fraction of the world population of cpus will be unable to make use of your
hard work. There may well be several hundred million x86 based desktop machines
around the world but I understand that over a billion ARMs were sold just last
year ;-)

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Any program that runs right is obsolete.



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list