[Swift-devel] faster branch

[Michael Wilde]

Mihael, this is great.

I'm eager to see us assemble a good set of stress tests into a test-group, and then apply it to both 0.94 and faster/.

Then get faster/ into trunk, and build on it for 0.95.

- Mike

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mihael Hategan" <hategan at mcs.anl.gov>
> To: "Swift Devel" <swift-devel at ci.uchicago.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 8:22:38 PM
> Subject: [Swift-devel] faster branch
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Over the past couple of weeks I committed the faster branch. It's
> essentially a re-implementation of the karajan language.
> 
> The gist of it is that it is now a semi-compiled language. What I
> mean
> by that is that there is no code generation, so the initial parse
> tree
> is converted into a compiled tree. Variable and function references
> are
> resolved at compile-time. This provides considerable improvements in
> performance from two fronts:
> 
> 1. The interpreter was changed from an event-based system (a system
> that
> made sense many years ago, but has little relevance for swift) to a
> lightweight threading implementation based on exceptions.
> 2. The compiler can make optimizations that weren't possible with a
> dynamic language. For example, once the swift and logging settings
> are
> known, code that conditionally executes based on a swift property or
> logging statements can be optimized away and have no run-time
> overhead.
> 
> There is also a benefit in memory consumed. Variables are now stored
> in
> arrays rather than hashtables. This should reduce the run-time
> overhead
> of the engine.
> 
> There are a few more relevant changes from swift's perspective:
> - there is no more karajan xml. Keeping two inter-operable syntaxes
> was
> a pain in the back.
> - sites.xml is now parsed with a DOM parser
> - all the coaster code has been moved into provider-coaster. Karajan
> is
> now independent of that (and the other way around).
> 
> Most of the tests pass, but that means little. So if you can give it
> a
> shot, please do. If it works sufficiently well, we can merge this
> into
> trunk.
> 
> Code is at:
> https://cogkit.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cogkit/branches/faster/
> https://svn.ci.uchicago.edu/svn/vdl2/branches/faster
> 
> Mihael
> 
> (PS: Contrary to my initial beliefs, the TUI seems to mostly work,
> but I
> haven't tested in detail).
> 
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