Thoughts about Cog and "tracing" etc

Previous Topic Next Topic
 
classic Classic list List threaded Threaded
2 messages Options
Reply | Threaded
Open this post in threaded view
|

Thoughts about Cog and "tracing" etc

Göran Krampe
 
Hi folks!

This post is a just a "heads up" based on some websurfing around VMs and
JITs. I am itching badly to hear Eliot announce some kind of Cog-thingy
- so consider this rambling post to be a symptom of that itch. :)

There are a few things going on in the VM world that most of us have no
clues about. We know about V8 but most may not know about
TraceMonkey/Tamarin and its use of a new technique called "tracing" and
a backing library for it - nanojit.

Evidently TraceMonkey is giving V8 a real run for its money, and AFAICT
this is mainly due to work of Andreas Gal (really interesting long article):

        http://andreasgal.com/2008/08/22/tracing-the-web

And some other:

        http://www.bailopan.net/blog/?p=72

Hot off the press (yesterday):

        http://www.bailopan.net/blog/?p=430

After having read that Eliot does not think LLVM is suitable mainly due
to lack of large basic blocks in Smalltalk code - and he seems to be
looking hard at Factor and its JIT - I just wanted to mention the above
as Yet Another Interesting Bit. I also think that the latest work on Lua
(LuaJIT) includes tracing, not sure though.

So Eliot, how is your work progressing? No pressure, just LOTS of
interest! :)

regards, Göran

PS. Being bored hacking C#...

Reply | Threaded
Open this post in threaded view
|

Re: [squeak-dev] Thoughts about Cog and "tracing" etc

Göran Krampe
 
Hi!

Just dug up their paper on TraceMonkey for PLDI 2009:

        http://blog.mozilla.com/dmandelin/tracemonkey-paper-pldi-2009/

Seemingly a really nice detailed paper!

regards, Göran