brrt to the future

Hi all. I usually write somewhat long-winded posts, but today I'm going to try and make an exception. Today I want to talk about the expression template language used to map the high-level MoarVM instructions to low-level constructs that the JIT compiler can easily work with: This 'language' was designed back in 2015 subject to three constraints: It should make it easy to develop 'templates' for MoarVM instructions, so we can map the ~800 or so different instructions supported by the interpreter to something the JIT compiler can work with. It should be simple to process and analyze; specifically, it should be suitable as input to the instruction selection process (the tiler). It should be simple to implement, both from the frontend (meaning the perl program that compiles a template file to a C header) and the backend (meaning the C code that combines templates into the IR that is compiled). Recently I've been working on adding support for floating point

Hi everybody! I recently read jnthn s Perl 6 new years resolutions post, and I realized that this was an excellent example to emulate. So here I will attempt to share what I've been doing in 2018 and what I'll be doing in 2019. In 2018, aside from the usual refactoring, bugfixing and the like: I added support for the fork() system call in the MoarVM backend. I removed the ' invokish ' control flow mechanism and replaced it with controlled return address modification. I requested a grant from the Perl Foundation aiming to complete the expression JIT compiler with floating point support, irregular registers and the like. So 2019 starts with me trying to complete the goals specified in that grant request. I've already partially completed one goal (as explained in the interim report ) - ensuring that register encoding works correctly for SSE registers in DynASM. Next up is actually ensuring support for SSE (and floating point) registers in the JIT, which is su