[Vm-dev] [Pharo-dev] About ~= and ~~

Clément Bera bera.clement at gmail.com
Thu Nov 24 13:09:04 UTC 2016


Hi,

Support for primitive 169 for Object>>#~~ has been in the VM for a while.
The default implementation in Squeak 5 uses this primitive for example.

I've just added today (VMMaker commit 2003) support for inlined #~~ like
#== (including JIT support, branch pipelining, etc.). If one puts #~~ in
the specialObjectsArray at the location of #blockCopy:, the bytecode
compiler generates the special send bytecode for #~~ leading to improved
performance and consistency between #== and #~~.

With today's update, the VM supports 3 inlined operations without any type
checks: #==, #~~ and #class. It is possible to disable such optimisations
in the bytecode compiler (In Pharo #class inlining is disabled there for
example). Eliot would like to add support to disable these operations at VM
level as a VM command line parameter too, and we may do it in the future.

Now this is for the VM support. It's up to the Pharo/Squeak/other community
to decide what behavior they want in their runtime for these 3 selectors.

In my opinion, I believe that #~~ should be consistent with #==, hence they
should be both inlined or both sends to primitives. I don't like the
current situation in Pharo nor in Squeak.

Now when we look for solutions, we see that one of #== and #~~ needs to be
a primitive (it's essential), hence it makes sense to have both Object>>#==
and Object>>#~~ as primitives (with the primitive pragma in the method
body). The inlining of #== and #~~ is arguable and I let the community
decide what they believe is best for their runtime, though I would rather
have the same behavior for both selectors.

Cheers

On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Aliaksei Syrel <alex.syrel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi
>
> It is been a while...
> So, do we want to replace ~~ with a primitive? :)
>
> Cheers
> Alex
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/About-
> and-tp3898409p4924391.html
> Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at
> Nabble.com.
>
>
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