On 27-Jul-07, at 11:20 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

Could you please post your changes for review first?

And didn't we already provide some closure handling prims a couple (at least) of years ago as a result of Anthony Hannan's work? Wasn't the new compiler supposed to use them?

(And no, I'm not being sarcastic this time, I actually can't remember for certain and I don't have time to scan mail/code to research this)

tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim "Wibble" said Pooh the stress beginning to show.

Hi

Did someone have time to look at my changes? Thanks

Mth

On Aug 5, 2007, at 8:35 PM, Marcus Denker wrote:

On 27.07.2007, at 20:24, tim Rowledge wrote:

...

On 27-Jul-07, at 11:20 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

...

Could you please post your changes for review first?

And didn't we already provide some closure handling prims a couple (at least) of years ago as a result of Anthony Hannan's work? Wasn't the new compiler supposed to use them?

Yes, the Anthony added 189, this was added to the 3.6 vmmaker, if I remember correctly. This is for Object>>#executeMethod, the speedup is substancial... but then, the #value of BlockClosure remained a normal method:

value "Evaluate the block with no args. Fail if the block expects other than 0 arguments."

^ environment executeMethod: method

vs. the one on BlockContext:

value "Primitive. Evaluate the block represented by the receiver. Fail if the block expects any arguments or if the block is already being executed. Optional. No Lookup. See Object documentation whatIsAPrimitive."

<primitive: 81> ^self valueWithArguments: #()

So for Closures, a #value requires right now a method invocation, a lookup and then prim 189. Math implemented a primitive for BlockContext>>#value, and the speedup is noticable (we should habe benchmarks somewhere).

We are looking into other things to speedup. e.g, BlockClosures contains a method, on #value this method is evaluated, which means that a context is created. BlockContexts are pre-allocated at compiletime instead. So for BlockClosures beeing comparabel to BlockContexts, it is very important to make sure that the context-cache is not flushed. The cache is right now flushed far too often, e.g. on blockCopy:, which is send to thisContext, and especially for the NewCompiler code on accessing the closure environment (which is done with message sends to thisContext).

With some care (and the right bytecodes) this can be improved dramatically it seems.

Another thing that makes Closures slow are accesses of outer temp variables. They are done with message sends right now. Having bytecodes for these would make sense, too.

Just avoiding context cache flushes + the #value primitive seem to get some impressive performance improvement already.... we need to do some more extensive benchmarking, but is lools quite good already.

Marcus

Marcus Denker -- denker@iam.unibe.ch http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker

Yes, I did. A few questions:

1) Why didn't you recycle prims 186 and 187? They are marked as "old closure primitives" but I don't think they have ever being used. Seems a bit more to the point than adding two new prim indexes.

2) Why indexed prims to begin with? I'd rather have named ones to start out with because it seems that there is quite some possibility that these prims might be changed again and then we get into troubles with the prim indexes. I would recommend to use named prims until there is a mainstream version of closures and then (if necessary) decide on which prim indexes to use.

3) Is there a reason why these prims aren't shortcut from bytecodePrimValue? If speed is the main point I'd expect that a quick type check for BlockClosure+primClosureValue outperforms the current implementation by far. It would also take the pressure of requiring an indexed primitive for speed.

Cheers, - Andreas

Mathieu Suen wrote:

Hi

Did someone have time to look at my changes? Thanks

Mth

On Aug 5, 2007, at 8:35 PM, Marcus Denker wrote:

...

On 27.07.2007, at 20:24, tim Rowledge wrote:

...

On 27-Jul-07, at 11:20 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

...

Could you please post your changes for review first?

And didn't we already provide some closure handling prims a couple (at least) of years ago as a result of Anthony Hannan's work? Wasn't the new compiler supposed to use them?

Yes, the Anthony added 189, this was added to the 3.6 vmmaker, if I remember correctly. This is for Object>>#executeMethod, the speedup is substancial... but then, the #value of BlockClosure remained a normal method:

value "Evaluate the block with no args. Fail if the block expects other than 0 arguments."

^ environment executeMethod: method

vs. the one on BlockContext:

value "Primitive. Evaluate the block represented by the receiver. Fail if the block expects any arguments or if the block is already being executed. Optional. No Lookup. See Object documentation whatIsAPrimitive."

<primitive: 81>
^self valueWithArguments: #()

So for Closures, a #value requires right now a method invocation, a lookup and then prim 189. Math implemented a primitive for BlockContext>>#value, and the speedup is noticable (we should habe benchmarks somewhere).

We are looking into other things to speedup. e.g, BlockClosures contains a method, on #value this method is evaluated, which means that a context is created. BlockContexts are pre-allocated at compiletime instead. So for BlockClosures beeing comparabel to BlockContexts, it is very important to make sure that the context-cache is not flushed. The cache is right now flushed far too often, e.g. on blockCopy:, which is send to thisContext, and especially for the NewCompiler code on accessing the closure environment (which is done with message sends to thisContext).

With some care (and the right bytecodes) this can be improved dramatically it seems.

Another thing that makes Closures slow are accesses of outer temp variables. They are done with message sends right now. Having bytecodes for these would make sense, too.

Just avoiding context cache flushes + the #value primitive seem to get some impressive performance improvement already.... we need to do some more extensive benchmarking, but is lools quite good already.

Marcus

-- Marcus Denker -- denker@iam.unibe.ch http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker

I've always thought that part of the process of providing full closure should be some smalltalk code to run on existing images where it looks for code that could be affected by moving to full closure. The problem with providing the primitives is that you don't know within your close base if you are abusing non-full closure in interesting ways which will now break your application subtle ways.

On Jul 27, 2007, at 11:20 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

Could you please post your changes for review first?

Cheers,

• Andreas

Mathieu Suen wrote:

...

Hi, The last week I have made a primitive for BlockClosure>>#value and #value:with:…. BlockClosure is the object that behave like the BlockCoontext except it provide full closure. So I would like to integrate my changes inside VMMake. For the time being I use primitive 576 and 577. Can you add my changes into the main stream of VMMaker? Thanks Mth

-- ======================================================================== === John M. McIntosh johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com ======================================================================== ===

Thanks Mth

On Jul 27, 2007, at 8:45 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

While I agree with both of your comments neither should stop us from looking at the code to see if it looks reasonable.

Cheers,

• Andreas

John M McIntosh wrote:

...

I've always thought that part of the process of providing full closure should be some smalltalk code to run on existing images where it looks for code that could be affected by moving to full closure. The problem with providing the primitives is that you don't know within your close base if you are abusing non-full closure in interesting ways which will now break your application subtle ways. On Jul 27, 2007, at 11:20 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

...

Could you please post your changes for review first?

Cheers,

• Andreas

Mathieu Suen wrote:

...

Hi, The last week I have made a primitive for BlockClosure>>#value and #value:with:…. BlockClosure is the object that behave like the BlockCoontext except it provide full closure. So I would like to integrate my changes inside VMMake. For the time being I use primitive 576 and 577. Can you add my changes into the main stream of VMMaker? Thanks Mth

--

====== John M. McIntosh johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http:// www.smalltalkconsulting.com ===================================================================== ======