[Vm-dev] Primitive replaceFrom:to:with:startingAt: in the JIT

[Clément Bera]

Hi all,

For a long time I was willing to add primitive #replaceFrom:to:with:startingAt:
in the JIT but did not take time to do it. These days I am showing the JIT
to one of my students and as an example of how one would write code in the
JIT we implemented this primitive together, Spur-only. This is part of
commit 2273.

I implemented quick paths for byte objects and array-like objects only. The
rationale behind this is that the most common cases I see in Pharo user
benchmarks in the profiler is copy of arrays and byteStrings. Typically
some application benchmarks would show 3-5% of time spent in copying small
things, and switching from the JIT runtime to C runtime is an important
part of the cost.

First evaluation shows the following speed-ups, but I've just done that
quickly in my machine:

Copy of size 0
    Array 2.85x
    ByteString 2.7x
Copy of size 1
    Array 2.1x
    ByteString 2x
Copy of size 3
    Array 2x
    ByteString 1.9x
Copy of size 8
    Array 1.8x
    ByteString 1.8x
Copy of size 64
   Array 1.1x
   ByteString 1.1x
Copy of size 1000
   Array 1x
   ByteString 1x

Failure paths are quicker too.

So I would expect some macro benchmarks to get 1 to 3% percent speed-up.
Not as much as I expected but it's there.

Can someone who is good at benchmarks such as Levente have a look and
provide us with a better evaluation of the performance difference ?

Thanks.

PS: Sry for double post Levente. First one got rejected by vm-dev, wrong
sender mail address.


-- 
Clément Béra
Pharo consortium engineer
https://clementbera.wordpress.com/
Bâtiment B 40, avenue Halley 59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq
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