Hi Tim,
On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 1:10 AM, Tim Felgentreff timfelgentreff@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Eliot,
the question for me is, how indicative is this workload of real world performance? Creating compiled methods may not be something that is highly optimized, simply because it doesn't need to be in real applications. One would have to be careful about what is being measured, or if the benchmark is just measuring how fast we can blow out the caches...
If we're just talking about running parsing and optimizing something, then maybe some real world applications are using that, but even then some JSON or HTML parsing library that implements e.g. Apache mod_rewrite would be more realistic, I think. Dynamically parsing and patching HTML and then pretty-printing or minimizing it seems a more common problem.
I know, you're trying to argue that the Opal compiler may show common workloads equally well, but we could argue that for some of the Shootout benchmarks, too. It's an argument that doesn't seem to convince some people.
I don't care in this case. I'm happy to include those other benchmarks. I just want to include one Smalltalk-centric benchmark that exemplifies excellent Smalltalk style and that uses the language to its full extent. One is likely to find that in a Smalltalk compiler; it's written by experts in the language, and I know that the Opal compiler is particularly clean. The point here is to have a benchmark that shows how well Scorch/Sista optimists an exemplary Smalltalk workload, not a generic workload to enable comparisons between languages. I'm as interested in seeing how fast Scorch/Sista is w.r.t. the Interpreter, the StackInterpreter, the V3 Cog VM and the Spur Cog VM, as in seeing how fast generic benchmarks are compared to other language implementations.
In any case I wouldn't be interested in installing the methods that the benchmark compiler would generate, only interested in its source -> compiled method transformation. Installing measures all sorts of JIT related hacks that are irrelevant to compute performance.
And of course, taking a snapshot of a specific Smalltalk compiler at a given point in time and sticking with it gives us much less of a moving target (collections etc will still affect things).
Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda@gmail.com schrieb am Do., 23. März 2017, 17:18:
Hi Tim,
On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 1:31 AM, Tim Felgentreff < timfelgentreff@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, big benchmarks would be nice. Those on speed.squeak.org or in VMMaker are all somewhat small.
Note the Ruby community, for example, has benchmarks such as a NES emulator (optcarrot) that can run for a few thousand frames with predefined input as benchmarks. It's definitely possible.
Maybe some of the projects from HPI students could be made to work, there was a Chip8 emulator in Squeak, for example, that seems big enough. Or maybe the DCPU emulator at github.com/fniephaus/BroDCPU without a frame limit would work as a decent CPU bound benchmark.
I've discussed with Clément doing something like cloning the Opal compiler, or the Squeak compiler, so that it uses a fixed set of classes that won't change over time, excepting the collections, and using as a benchmark this compiler recompiling all its own methods. This is a nice mix of string processing (in the tokenizer) and symbolic processing (in the building and optimizing of the parse tree).
Cross - dialect could be hard. Pharo and Squeak are fairly easy to do, but with larger programs staying compatible across different dialects is harder.
Again, extracting a compiler from its host system would make it possible to maintain a cross-platform version. It could be left as an exercise to the reader to port it to one's favorite non-Smalltalk dynamic language.
tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org schrieb am Mi., 22. März 2017, 21:40:
On 21-03-2017, at 4:53 PM, Javier Pimás elpochodelagente@gmail.com
wrote:
Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of
assessing performance.
Have you tried the benchmarks package - CogBenchmarks - included in the source.squeak.org/VMMaker repository?
tim
tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Strange OpCodes: BOMB: Burn Out Memory Banks
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot