2014.26: On-Stack-Replacement, stability, …

Well, let’s see here …

• On-Stack-Replacement was merged by jnthn into master and seems pretty stable. It lets the bytecode specializer (and later the JIT compiler) kick in even when there are no invocations involved, like in a loop with many iterations.
• There’s also improvements to inlining, especially stronger return handler elimination inside Rakudo.
• Today, jnthn put a bunch of work into making MoarVM’s multithreading and async I/O stuff more robust. We’re regularly torture-testing a very simple asynchronous server using wrk (a tool like ab) to find race conditions and such. It’s not perfectly stable, but getting better.
• Lizmat also made some async/threads fixes.
• The JIT compiler for MoarVM learned how to handle lexicals (bindlex and getlex), simple attribute access for objects and “World Values” (most commonly compile-time constants and classes/subs)
• A talk by jnthn on garbage collectors in general and the garbage collector of MoarVM in particular has made it onto the public ‘net. You can watch it on InfoQ.
• There’s a few new benchmarks in the perl6-bench repository. As opposed to the big chunk of microbenchmarks we’ve had so far, these are a bit bigger. They were taken from RosettaCode.
• Japhb also started working on a “history” comparison type for perl6-bench, but it doesn’t have an output functionality for html graphs.
• Here’s a couple of days old benchmark run that compares rakudo and nqp with and without a recent fix to OSR and inlining to a 2014.06 released rakudo/nqp as well as perl5. This doesn’t include the JIT, unfortunately, and the difference is only really noticable in a few of the graphs (damn you, log-log scale!). I guess for next week I ought to make a somewhat more comprehensive benchmark with older versions and maybe even with the JIT.
• FROGGS’ panda version with CPAN support can now extract .tar.gz files it pulls from the ‘net!
• Someone added a bunch of examples to RosettaCode, but I couldn’t easily figure out which ones. But since RosettaCode is constantly growing anyway, it’s always a good time to check out what’s new!

I’m already looking forward to next week’s changes, there’s lots of stuff that still needs doing. For example, we’ve been avoiding the string (actually rope) rewrite for a long time and MoarVM’s performance for things like concatenation has suffered greatly for it.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I wish you a pleasant week 🙂