Could not we do a task force to clean the compiler? We need a better infrastructure for the tool. Stef On Fri, Nov 24, 2017 at 11:35 AM, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:
2017-11-24 10:54 GMT+01:00 Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr>:
On 23 Nov 2017, at 23:37, Clément Bera <bera.clement@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Nicolas.
Just some comments:
Another thing you can try is to remove the allocation of Opal's IR. It seems people use the IR only through the IRBuilder, so the API can be kept but it can generate directly bytecode instead of IR then bytecode. Removing those allocations would speed things up. It means merging IRFix / IRTranslator / IRBytecodeGenerator somehow and have the IRBuilder API directly call the new resulting merged class.
Another thing is that when Opal became the default compiler, I evaluated the speed and saw it was slower, but when loading large projects it seemed loading time was dominated by Monticello / source reading / source loading and the compilation time was overall not that significant (< 20% of time). I don't know if this is still the case with GIT. I have problems currently when editing some large methods (it seems in the IDE the method is compiled at each keystroke...) and when doing OpalCompiler recompileAll (which I do often since I edit bytecode sets) but else the performance of Opal seems to be OK. Evaluate performance may be relevant in some cases but I've never found such cases outside of the IDE in production.
Yes, the IR came over from the existing design of the ClosureCompiler for Squeak that Opal is was based on initially⦠I liked it at first because I was looking into byte code manipulation back then and for that it was quite nice.
But for compiling, it adds a layer that is not really needed. If I would do it again I would not use this IR level in the compiler but instead do something simpler and use the BytecodeBuilder directly.
But as Clement notes: it is not that much time when doing compilation if you consider the whole use-case of compiling, so this seemed not that of a problem (e.g. for compiling the image, we were happy with a factor 2, I did not benchmark recently, but I think this is what we reached).
For the frontend (compile to AST + name analysis), it is fast enough to do syntax highlighting in the browser with it instead of a specialised parser, so that part is quite ok.
Agree
One other thing that needs cleanup: the API/ OpalCompiler class. This tries to be compatible with the old API (e.g. failBlock) and got quite hacked to death over time⦠we should clean that up. The complexity of #evaluate is partly due to that, I think.
Marcus
Yes, that was exactly my feeling.