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"Yes, you can build AOT compilers that beat JITs produced by meta-tracing an interpreter" - not for all the languages. As mentioned below, there is a certain tr

by fijal 11y ago

"Yes, you can build AOT compilers that beat JITs produced by meta-tracing an interpreter" - not for all the languages. As mentioned below, there is a certain tradeoff associated with JITs - warmup time, memory consumptions etc. But for certain class of problems (say compiling Python) and for certain class of use cases (running at top speed), I dare you to compete with PyPy. The biggest contender so far comes from the Zippy project, which is indeed built on truffle which is a meta JIT, albeit a method based one.

mafribe 11y ago
I agree with you. I have updated my original post appropriately.
mkesper 11y ago
It isn't that easy to search for ZipPy: https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy
mafribe 11y ago
An interesting question is: can one build a meta-AOT compiler framework that converts an interpreter into a reasonably good AOT compiler? If not, why not?
- fijal 11y ago
  Not sure, don't have much experience with that. This is a "classic" futamura projection - you write an interpreter and the "magic" turns it into a compiler. I'm not aware of any consumer-grade compiler like that, but there is a huge swath of research on that. You can very easily create a dumb one - you just copy-paste interpreter loop essentially (which is what e.g. cython does if not presented with annotations), however the results just aren't very good
  - mafribe 11y ago
    Research on partial evaluation (PE) was fashionable in the 1990s, but largely fizzled out. I was told that was because they could never really get the results to run fast. I'm trying to understand why. Clearly meta-tracing and PE have a lot of overlap. Truffle is based on some variant of dynamic PE if I understand what they do correctly. Most of the 1990s work in PE was more about static PE I think. The paper [1] touches on some of these issues, but I have not studied it closely yet. [1] http://stefan-marr.de/downloads/oopsla15-marr-ducasse-meta-tracing-vs-partial-evaluation.pdf http://stefan-marr.de/downloads/oopsla15-marr-ducasse-meta-t...
- themgt 11y ago
  In a truly dynamic/metaprogrammable language, wouldn't this be equivalent to solving the halting problem?
  - mafribe 11y ago
    No, why do you think it would?

by fijal 11y ago

mafribe 11y ago

I agree with you. I have updated my original post appropriately.

mkesper 11y ago

It isn't that easy to search for ZipPy: https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy

mafribe 11y ago

An interesting question is: can one build a meta-AOT compiler framework that converts an interpreter into a reasonably good AOT compiler? If not, why not?

fijal 11y ago
Not sure, don't have much experience with that. This is a "classic" futamura projection - you write an interpreter and the "magic" turns it into a compiler. I'm not aware of any consumer-grade compiler like that, but there is a huge swath of research on that. You can very easily create a dumb one - you just copy-paste interpreter loop essentially (which is what e.g. cython does if not presented with annotations), however the results just aren't very good
- mafribe 11y ago
  Research on partial evaluation (PE) was fashionable in the 1990s, but largely fizzled out. I was told that was because they could never really get the results to run fast. I'm trying to understand why. Clearly meta-tracing and PE have a lot of overlap. Truffle is based on some variant of dynamic PE if I understand what they do correctly. Most of the 1990s work in PE was more about static PE I think. The paper [1] touches on some of these issues, but I have not studied it closely yet. [1] http://stefan-marr.de/downloads/oopsla15-marr-ducasse-meta-tracing-vs-partial-evaluation.pdf http://stefan-marr.de/downloads/oopsla15-marr-ducasse-meta-t...
themgt 11y ago
In a truly dynamic/metaprogrammable language, wouldn't this be equivalent to solving the halting problem?
- mafribe 11y ago
  No, why do you think it would?