brrt to the future

It's wrap-up time! This will be my final post in the GSoC 2014 program, because the GSoC 2014 progam ends 19:00 UTC today, so that's early enough that I won't be writing another post today. It's hard enough to write a post every week as it is. So what I'd like to do today is wrap-up what we've reached and what I've learned in the past three months. Let's start with a summary of what has been reached. MoarVM has an optional JIT compiler based on spesh , which is the optimization framework I've mentioned often by now. The JIT compiled code cannot handle all instruction yet, but it can handle loops, invocations, perl6 container ops, some regular expressions, expressions and deoptimisation. Reported benefits are anywhere between nothing and 50% faster code, which is awesome. I assume very few people have a lot of truly computation-intensive code running on rakudo perl6 yet, but I suspect that is where it would help most. The code-generator that we cu...

I compensate for the infrequency of my blog posts with their length. Or the other way around. Anyway, I have some good news to report, so let's do that first. The JIT branch of MoarVM (moar-jit), which has been my work for the last few months, has been merged into the main branch just this morning, after we've found it not to crash and burn on building nqp, rakudo, and running spectests. This means that, with some fiddling, you too can now run JIT for MoarVM, NQP, and Perl 6. World domination for camelia! Well, unless we find new bugs, of course. We've had plenty of these the last few weeks, and most of them all had the same cause, which can be summarized simply: semantic use of the interpreter process counter is not really compatible with JIT compilation. But maybe that requires some elaboration. Simply put, during interpreting MoarVM sometimes needs to know exactly where in the program the interpreter is. This happens, for example, when using handlers, which is the me...