Re: Experimental JIT for Guile (???!)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guilers!

Nala Ginrut <address@hidden> skribis:

> Well, there's interesting story behind it.
> Few days ago this new JIT backend named Nash was introduced in ICFP2016 
> (scheme
> workshop), I and Ludo are lecturers too. When I first saw the topic, I looked
> back to Ludo and thought "oh you guys are making a new weapon secretly huh?"
> I thought this work must be encouraged and helped by Ludo or Wingo or Mark, 
> but
> finally I realized that I was wrong, the author Atsuro Hoshino was hacking JIT
> backend for Guile all by himself. Ludo got surprised too.
> I have to say, lone hero pattern is not recommended for a community project, 
> but
> anyway he did it bravely and the result seems good according to the paper.
> After the meeting, I and Ludo tried to convince him to get involved into our
> community to get more help and feedback. 

Yes, that’s really crazy stuff I must say.  I was really blown when I
listened to the talk—the Mandelbrot demo, the benchmarks!

I cannot see the video at
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoH3jteqsb2jcsSe4Ve1TDeLL5fCCiwzC>
but I hope it’ll show up eventually.

Atsuro, Nala, and I discussed about all this.  Atsuro did the right
thing IMO: the tracing JIT relies only on a couple of additional hooks
to the VM engine.  Thus, Nash (that’s the name of the tracing JIT)
simply adds an additional VM engine with these extra hooks, alongside
the regular and debug engines we already have.

What I told Atsuro is that the next 2.1 release could provide this extra
VM engine; after all, it doesn’t cost us anything.  That way, Nash could
be maintained separately as it matures, and everyone would be able to
try it out without having to recompile Guile.

WDYT?

Atsuro: I was hoping that you would introduce yourself here, but see,
everyone is already excited by your work (and rightfully so!).  Feel
free to chime in, you are very much welcome here!  :-)

Cheers,
Ludo’.

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