[Vm-dev] Powerful JIT optimization

[Eliot Miranda]

Hi Florin,

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Florin Mateoc <florin.mateoc at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>  On 11/4/2013 3:07 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>
> Hi Florin,
>
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 7:09 AM, Florin Mateoc <florin.mateoc at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi Eliot,
>>
>> I am not sure if this is the right moment to bring this up, when you are
>> so busy with the new garbage collector, but,
>> since you were also talking about powerful new optimizations and this
>> seems a very good one... I was toying with the
>> idea before, but I did not have the right formulation for it - I was
>> thinking of doing it on the image side, at the AST
>> level and then communicating somehow with the VM (this aspect becomes
>> moot if the JIT code is generated from Smalltalk),
>> but now I stumbled upon it on the web and I think it would be better done
>> inside the JIT. In Rémi Forax' formulation:
>>
>> "On thing that trace based JIT has shown is that a loop or function are
>> valid optimization entry points. So like you can
>> have an inlining cache for function at callsite, you should have a kind
>> of inlining cache at the start of a loop."
>>
>> This was in the context of a blog entry by Cliff Click:
>>
>> http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2011-04-04-fixing-the-inlining-problem
>> The comments also contain other useful suggestions.
>>
>> And, the loop inlining cache could also specialize not just on the
>> receiver block, but also on the types of the
>> arguments (this is true for methods as well, but, in the absence of
>> profiling information, loops are more likely to be
>> "hot", plus we can easily detect nested loops which reinforce the
>> "hotness")
>>
>
>  AFAICT this is subsumed under adaptive optimization/speculative
> inlining.  i.e. this is one of the potential optimizations in an adaptive
> optimizing VM.  Further, I also believe that by for the best place to do
> this kind of thing is indeed in the image, and to do it at the
> bytecode-to-bytecode level.  But I've said this many times before and don't
> want to waste cycles waffling again.
>
>  thanks.
> e.
>
>  Regards,
>> Florin
>>
>
> --
> best,
> Eliot
>
> This is a bit like saying that we don't need garbage collection because we
> can do liveness/escape analysis in the image. I think there is a place for
> both sides
>

No it's not.  If you read my design sketch on bytecode-to-bytecode adaptive
optimisation you'll understand that it's not.  It's simply that one can
do bytecode-to-bytecode adaptive optimisation in the image, and that that's
a better place to do adaptive optimisation than in the VM.  But again I've
gone into this many times before on the mailing list and I don't want to
get into it again.

Cheers,
> Florin
>

-- 
best,
Eliot
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