[Vm-dev] new Cog VMs

[Eliot Miranda]

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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