Planning Exupery 0.13

>
> My current plan for 0.13 is:
>   * Get background compiler to ignore methods that failed to compile
>   * Don't flush the code cache on every class change
>   * Fix more bugs
>   * Add some instrumentation to get quantitative information on time
>     spent compiling and the percentage of time spent in compiled code.
>
> The goal is to make the background compiler practical. It will still
> be limited due to missing features slowing down compiled code and slow
> compile times. A test would be to run the background compiler until
> Exupery was compiled then to start playing with tinyBenchmarks and to
> see the improvement as it compiles the methods and inlines the
> primitives.
>
> Currently the background compiler doesn't avoid methods that have
> failed to compile once. This is a problem as the compilation queue
> could get full of methods that don't compile blocking compilation of
> methods that do compile.
>
> Flushing the code cache on every class change is overkill. It also
> reduces the value of some of the acceptance testing as it can't
> effectively test compiling tests that change classes and several do.
>
> It would be nice if Exupery reported the percentage of time spent in
> compiled code to gauge how well the background compiler was doing. I
> can measure this using oprofile but not in Squeak. It would also be
> nice if Exupery recorded how long a method took to compile to gauge
> how much of a problem compilation speed currently is. It would be nice
> if Exupery recorded why methods failed to compile so it was easy to
> figure out how important adding the remaining missing features is.
>
>
> The other possibility for 0.13 would be to optimise compilation time.
> There are a few methods that take minutes to compile due to known
> performance bugs in the register allocator. Increasing the speed of
> the compiler will both make compilation more practical and make it
> cheaper to compile more code in tests.
>
> The third major thing required before a 1.0 would be to implement
> cascades and a few more bytecodes. This should allow Exupery to
> optimise more code successfully. This is aiming to optimise run time
> performance. I'm not considering this for 0.13 but is needed before
> 1.0.
>
> Bryce
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