Archive of posts with the tag Optimization

• Jun 6, 2023: Squeezing a Little More Performance Out of Bytecode Interpreters

• Nov 8, 2022: How Effective are Classic Lookup Optimizations for Rails Apps?

  We know that Ruby and especially Rails applications can be very dynamic and pretty large. Though, many of the optimizations interpreters and even just-in-time compilers use have been invented in the 1980s and 1990s before Ruby and Rails even existed. So, I was wondering: do these optimizations still have a chance of coping with the millions of lines of Ruby code that large Rails apps from Shopify, Stripe, or GitLab have? Unfortunately, we don’t have access to such applications. As the next best thing, we took the largest Ruby benchmarks we could get our hands on, and analyzed those.

• Oct 30, 2022: Reducing Memory Footprint by Minimizing Hidden Class Graphs

  Tomoharu noticed in his work on the eJSVM, a JavaScript virtual machine for embedded systems, that quite a bit of memory is needed for the data that helps us to represent JavaScript objects efficiently. So, we started to look into how the memory use could be reduced without sacrificing performance.

• Jul 26, 2021: Interpreters, Compilation, and Concurrency Tooling in PLAS at Kent

  Here at Kent, we have a large group of researchers working on Programming Languages and Systems (PLAS), and within this group, we have a small team focusing on research on interpreters, compilation, and tooling to make programming easier.

• Feb 18, 2021: Open Postdoc Position on Language Implementation and Concurrency

• Dec 7, 2020: Preventing Concurrency Bugs from Causing Harm, Automatically

• Apr 17, 2018: A Typical Truffle Specialization Pitfall

  Writing specializations is generally pretty straight forward, but there is at least one common pitfall. When designing specializations, we need to remind ourselves that type-based specializations are technically guards.

• Oct 22, 2016: Language Research with Truffle at the SPLASH'16 Conference

  Next weekend starts one of the major conferences of the programming languages research community. The conference hosts many events including our Meta’16 workshop on Metaprogramming, SPLASH-I with research and industry talks, the Dynamic Languages Symposium, and the OOPSLA research track.

• Jan 12, 2016: Type Hierarchies and Guards in Truffle Languages

  Continuing a little bit with writing notes on Truffle and Graal, this one is based on my observations in SOMns and changes to its message dispatch mechanism. Specifically, I refactored the main message dispatch chain in SOMns. As in Self and Newspeak, all interactions with objects are message sends. Thus, field access and method invocation is essentially the same. This means that message sending is a key to good performance.

• Dec 8, 2015: Add Graal JIT Compilation to Your JVM Language in 5 Easy Steps, Step 5

  Step 5: Optimizing the Interpreter for Compilation

• Oct 23, 2015: JIT Data Structures, Fully Reflective VMs, and Meta-Circular Meta-Tracing

  The year leading up to SPLASH has been pretty busy. Beside my own talks on Tracing vs. Partial Evaluation and Optimizing Communicating Event-Loop Languages with Truffle, there are going to be three other presentations on work I was involved in.