5 ms·

Higgs JavaScript Virtual Machine

160 points by jermo 12y ago

inglor 12y ago
Other than 'for fun' - does this serve a commercial purpose? Looks very cool regardless
- EvenThisAcronym 12y ago
  The Higgs VM is part of Maxime Chevalier's PhD work.You can find her blog here: http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/category/higgs/ http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/category/higgs/.
- grayrest 12y ago
  It's a PhD research project. See the project overview page for specifics: http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/ http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/
- agumonkey 12y ago
  In some air.mozilla.org talk the author said that this research was very unconventional and if successfull could bring generic yet not marginal perf improvements in a lot of languages.
  - glennsl 12y ago
    link: https://air.mozilla.org/higgs-jit/ https://air.mozilla.org/higgs-jit/
- jussij 12y ago
  > does this serve a commercial purpose? I'm sure the high paying job offers will be coming in thick and fast.
- tach4n 12y ago
  It's a research project so it produces experience and, well, research that can be useful to commercial enterprises. Lots of companies have an interest in making dynamic languages faster. The project does have a secondary goal be a useful hobbyist platform and is making progress on that front. (disclaimer: I'm a minor contributor.)
jonny_eh 12y ago
What is this? All the readme says is what's required to use it.
- kr0 12y ago
  I believe it's a cross compiler for JS.
  - tachyonbeam 12y ago
    It's a JIT compiler that generates x86-64 machine code
    - echaozh 12y ago
      You either have an AOT compiler or an interpreter with JIT compilation. What's a JIT compiler?
      - protopete 12y ago
        AOT: ahead of time JIT: just in time Compiler applies to both of them.
      - mistercow 12y ago
        Here are about 5,000 reasons that nitpick is silly: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=%22jit+compiler%22&hl=en&as_sdt=1,5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=%22jit+compiler... Clearly the term "JIT compiler" is a common way to describe such a system.
      - bzbarsky 12y ago
        V8 has no interpreter. Just a pair of compilers (first tier and second tier), which compile stuff lazily at the point when it needs to run. Would you call that an "AOT compiler"? Because most people wouldn't.
- jermo 12y ago
  It's a JavaScript JIT compiler. From the info page [1]: Some notable features of Higgs include: - A self-hosted runtime written in extended JavaScript - Lazy/incremental JIT compilation Context-driven versioning of basic blocks - A Foreign Function Interface (FFI) system to interface with C code - An interactive shell (REPL) with access to low-level primitives. - A simple module system and a set of useful libraries. Example usage: higgs --e "var x = 4; x = x + 5; print(x)" or higgs file.js [1] http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/ http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/
tinco 12y ago
Crazy that she basically implemented a fully functioning JIT compiler that performs on par with the established commercial Javascript interpreters out there on many fronts in only two years using novel techniques, but reviewers reject her papers because they are unconvinced the novel technique has advantages over existing techniques? How does that even matter? If someone discovers a new way of implementing compilers efficiently, then just that has scientific merit. Whether the new technique has different performance characteristics surely is simply ground for further research? Anyway, awesome that at least the engineering community is very interested in this work of hers. edit: I noticed the compiler is written in D, awesome choice of tech!
- mkaufmann 12y ago
  Concerning your critique of the in your opinion overly hard scientific review process. According to her blog the paper was rejected because: "Reviewers at conferences [...] have been very skeptical, and pressed us multiple times to produce some kind of comparison of basic block versioning against tracing."[1] I think this is a very valid concern. When you describe a new scientific approach (Basic Block Versioning) you should compare to the state of the art. Otherwise it is very hard for the reader to judge the merit of the new approach. However I agree with your sentiment that a new approach should not only be judged by performance numbers (there is actually a nice article going deeper on this topic on databasearchitects[2]). But there should at least be a more thorough theoretical discussion than only 3-4 sentences. Benchmarks comparing to existing approaches in this case can help to show pathological cases which might indicate weaknesses of the approach or to empirically demonstrate the feasibility of the new approach. [1] http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/the-fastest-for-in-loops-in-the-whole-wide-web/ http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/the-fastest... [2] http://databasearchitects.blogspot.de/2014/09/experiments-hurt-review-process.html http://databasearchitects.blogspot.de/2014/09/experiments-hu... EDIT: Many conferences also allow publishing papers without a deep comparison to exisiting research in the industrial session. This allows demonstrations of interesting implementation variants or system choices EDIT 2: The review critisim in older blog posts "Conference reviewers criticized us for not discussing compilation times, and raised the issue that perhaps basic block versioning could drastically increase compilation times." is also very valid for a jit compiler. Again discussion does not have to mean that you have to be faster than all existing systems. Paper acceptance is always a little bit a random process, but at least in this case the review comments are valid from my point of view and her phd advisor should probably have detected these problems in proofreading before submitting. I really hope that the paper will finally be accepted!
tach4n 12y ago
If you're curious about Higgs you can joins us in our irc: #higgsjs on freenode. We also have a subreddit: r/higgsjs
0x7fffffff16 12y ago
Why the _fuck_ is it written in _D_ programming language. That very fact is very sad. If it was implemented in C or C++ then I'm sure it would be pretty cool.
smilepet_26 12y ago
Some notable features of Higgs include: - A self-hosted runtime written in extended JavaScript - Lazy/incremental JIT compilation Context-driven versioning of basic blocks - A Foreign Function Interface (FFI) system to interface with C code - An interactive shell (REPL) with access to low-level primitives. - A simple module system and a set of useful libraries. I like these features. This is simply awesome.
- noiv 12y ago
  There was even a proposal to have inline x86 assembly...
rurban 12y ago
I'm impressed by the bbv idea, but not about the startup-time overhead which is even worse than perl6 or the jvm. Even if the run-time of big loops is later on faster than v8. $ time ./higgs --e "var x = 4; x = x + 5; print(x)" 9 real 0m1.191s e.g. my own little jitted language which compiles also to C like asm with tagged data, but with inner-loop type-checks, does it in $ time bin/potion -e'x = 4, x = x + 5, x print' 9 real 0m0.005s so I don't buy the compiler overhead yet. type checks are not that slow. $ time ./perl6-p -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x' 9 real 0m0.818s $ time ./perl6-m -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x' 9 real 0m0.614s and uncompiled: $ time perl -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x' 9 real 0m0.010s

160 points by jermo 12y ago

inglor 12y ago

Other than 'for fun' - does this serve a commercial purpose? Looks very cool regardless

EvenThisAcronym 12y ago
The Higgs VM is part of Maxime Chevalier's PhD work.You can find her blog here: http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/category/higgs/ http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/category/higgs/.
grayrest 12y ago
It's a PhD research project. See the project overview page for specifics: http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/ http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/
agumonkey 12y ago
In some air.mozilla.org talk the author said that this research was very unconventional and if successfull could bring generic yet not marginal perf improvements in a lot of languages.
- glennsl 12y ago
  link: https://air.mozilla.org/higgs-jit/ https://air.mozilla.org/higgs-jit/
jussij 12y ago
> does this serve a commercial purpose? I'm sure the high paying job offers will be coming in thick and fast.
tach4n 12y ago
It's a research project so it produces experience and, well, research that can be useful to commercial enterprises. Lots of companies have an interest in making dynamic languages faster. The project does have a secondary goal be a useful hobbyist platform and is making progress on that front. (disclaimer: I'm a minor contributor.)

jonny_eh 12y ago

What is this? All the readme says is what's required to use it.

kr0 12y ago
I believe it's a cross compiler for JS.
- tachyonbeam 12y ago
  It's a JIT compiler that generates x86-64 machine code
  - echaozh 12y ago
    You either have an AOT compiler or an interpreter with JIT compilation. What's a JIT compiler?
    - protopete 12y ago
      AOT: ahead of time JIT: just in time Compiler applies to both of them.
    - mistercow 12y ago
      Here are about 5,000 reasons that nitpick is silly: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=%22jit+compiler%22&hl=en&as_sdt=1,5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=%22jit+compiler... Clearly the term "JIT compiler" is a common way to describe such a system.
    - bzbarsky 12y ago
      V8 has no interpreter. Just a pair of compilers (first tier and second tier), which compile stuff lazily at the point when it needs to run. Would you call that an "AOT compiler"? Because most people wouldn't.
jermo 12y ago
It's a JavaScript JIT compiler. From the info page [1]: Some notable features of Higgs include: - A self-hosted runtime written in extended JavaScript - Lazy/incremental JIT compilation Context-driven versioning of basic blocks - A Foreign Function Interface (FFI) system to interface with C code - An interactive shell (REPL) with access to low-level primitives. - A simple module system and a set of useful libraries. Example usage: higgs --e "var x = 4; x = x + 5; print(x)" or higgs file.js [1] http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/ http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/

tinco 12y ago

Crazy that she basically implemented a fully functioning JIT compiler that performs on par with the established commercial Javascript interpreters out there on many fronts in only two years using novel techniques, but reviewers reject her papers because they are unconvinced the novel technique has advantages over existing techniques? How does that even matter? If someone discovers a new way of implementing compilers efficiently, then just that has scientific merit. Whether the new technique has different performance characteristics surely is simply ground for further research? Anyway, awesome that at least the engineering community is very interested in this work of hers. edit: I noticed the compiler is written in D, awesome choice of tech!

mkaufmann 12y ago
Concerning your critique of the in your opinion overly hard scientific review process. According to her blog the paper was rejected because: "Reviewers at conferences [...] have been very skeptical, and pressed us multiple times to produce some kind of comparison of basic block versioning against tracing."[1] I think this is a very valid concern. When you describe a new scientific approach (Basic Block Versioning) you should compare to the state of the art. Otherwise it is very hard for the reader to judge the merit of the new approach. However I agree with your sentiment that a new approach should not only be judged by performance numbers (there is actually a nice article going deeper on this topic on databasearchitects[2]). But there should at least be a more thorough theoretical discussion than only 3-4 sentences. Benchmarks comparing to existing approaches in this case can help to show pathological cases which might indicate weaknesses of the approach or to empirically demonstrate the feasibility of the new approach. [1] http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/the-fastest-for-in-loops-in-the-whole-wide-web/ http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/the-fastest... [2] http://databasearchitects.blogspot.de/2014/09/experiments-hurt-review-process.html http://databasearchitects.blogspot.de/2014/09/experiments-hu... EDIT: Many conferences also allow publishing papers without a deep comparison to exisiting research in the industrial session. This allows demonstrations of interesting implementation variants or system choices EDIT 2: The review critisim in older blog posts "Conference reviewers criticized us for not discussing compilation times, and raised the issue that perhaps basic block versioning could drastically increase compilation times." is also very valid for a jit compiler. Again discussion does not have to mean that you have to be faster than all existing systems. Paper acceptance is always a little bit a random process, but at least in this case the review comments are valid from my point of view and her phd advisor should probably have detected these problems in proofreading before submitting. I really hope that the paper will finally be accepted!

tach4n 12y ago

If you're curious about Higgs you can joins us in our irc: #higgsjs on freenode. We also have a subreddit: r/higgsjs

0x7fffffff16 12y ago

Why the _fuck_ is it written in _D_ programming language. That very fact is very sad. If it was implemented in C or C++ then I'm sure it would be pretty cool.

smilepet_26 12y ago

Some notable features of Higgs include: - A self-hosted runtime written in extended JavaScript - Lazy/incremental JIT compilation Context-driven versioning of basic blocks - A Foreign Function Interface (FFI) system to interface with C code - An interactive shell (REPL) with access to low-level primitives. - A simple module system and a set of useful libraries. I like these features. This is simply awesome.

noiv 12y ago
There was even a proposal to have inline x86 assembly...

rurban 12y ago

I'm impressed by the bbv idea, but not about the startup-time overhead which is even worse than perl6 or the jvm. Even if the run-time of big loops is later on faster than v8. $ time ./higgs --e "var x = 4; x = x + 5; print(x)" 9 real 0m1.191s e.g. my own little jitted language which compiles also to C like asm with tagged data, but with inner-loop type-checks, does it in $ time bin/potion -e'x = 4, x = x + 5, x print' 9 real 0m0.005s so I don't buy the compiler overhead yet. type checks are not that slow. $ time ./perl6-p -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x' 9 real 0m0.818s $ time ./perl6-m -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x' 9 real 0m0.614s and uncompiled: $ time perl -e'my $x=4; $x=$x+5; print $x' 9 real 0m0.010s