Thanks for your great work Eliot.

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Germán Arduino <garduino at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow fantastic!
> I will try tomorrow on my usual development work.
> Thanks by share!
> German.
>
> 2010/12/30, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>:
>> Hi All,
>>
>>      I've released a new version of Cog that has a substantially improved
>> code generator along the lines of Peter Deutsch's HPS (VisualWorks) and
>> various of Ian Piumarta's VMs.  These all use a simple tecnique to identify
>> constant references in bytecode and to support a register-based calling
>> convention.  While this does produce faster code it tends to accelerate
>> low-level code much more than high-level code as you can see by the
>> following benchmarks:
>>
>> SimpleStackBasedCogit: [1 to: 100000000 do: [:i|]] timeToRun 691
>> StackToRegisterMappingCogit: [1 to: 100000000 do: [:i|]] timeToRun 192
>> 192 - 691 / 6.91 -72%
>>
>> SimpleStackBasedCogit: 0 tinyBenchmarks '753495217 bytecodes/sec; 64769127
>> sends/sec'
>> StackToRegisterMappingCogit: 0 tinyBenchmarks '931756141 bytecodes/sec;
>> 128157989 sends/sec'
>> 931756141 - 753495217 / 7534952.17 -24%
>> 128157989 - 64769127 / 647691.27 -98%
>>
>> SimpleStackBasedCogit: [Compiler recompileAll] timeToRun 47013 (no
>> transcript
>> StackToRegisterMappingCogit: [Compiler recompileAll] timeToRun 43406 (no
>> transcript)
>> 43406 - 47013 / 470.13 -7.67234594686576
>>
>> The status of this code is essentially beta.  The test suite runs the same
>> on the new code generator as on the old, but I think there are still bugs
>> because I get the occasional transient error.  I am therefore very
>> interested in any reproducible errors you can find.
>>
>> The VMs (http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/VM.r2334/) contain a few
>> other important changes:
>>
>> - a bug fix to bytecode<->native pc mappng that produced incorrect results
>> for methods containing blocks with ^-returns in them.  One symptom is
>> incorrect highlighting of the pc in the debugger, althoguh symptoms could be
>> much serious.
>>
>> - jitting interpreted methods on backward branches.  Currently any
>> interpreted method that performs more than 20 backward branches will be
>> considered for JIT compilation and if it is suitable (default, <= 60
>> literals) will be compiled to native code.
>>
>> - new callback support.  I need to commit some changes to the Alien package
>> to provide access to this but essentially the VM's callback support is now
>> able to be ported to architectures with register-based calling conventions
>> (ARM, PowerPC, SPARC etc).  I'll try and get the Alien code released soon,
>> and to back-port the changes to the standard VM before the end of the
>> holiday.
>>
>> One thing that is still /not/ fixed is the lack of a SoundPlugin on win32.
>>  Apologies.  I'll try and get a fix for this before the end of the holidays
>> too, but time might be too tight.  There are other priorities such as
>> harmonising the standard and Cog VMs for the 4.2 release.
>>
>> best
>> Eliot
>>
>
>
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