Hello.
First a disclaimer. This post is more about plans for future than current status. We usually try to write about things that we have done, because it's much much easier to promise things than to actually make it happen, but I think it's important enough to have some sort of roadmap.
In recent months we came to the point where the 5th generation of JIT prototype was working as nice or even a bit nicer than 1st one back in 2007. Someone might ask "so why did you spend all this time without going forward?". And indeed, we spend a lot of time moving sideways, but as posted, we also spent a lot of time doing some other things, which are important as well. The main advantage of current JIT incarnation is much much simpler than the first one. Even I can comprehend it, which is much of an improvement :-)
So, the prototype is working and gives very nice speedups in range of 20-30x over CPython. We're pretty confident this prototype will work and will produce fast python interpreter eventually. So we decided that now we'll work towards changing prototype into something stable and solid. This might sound easy, but in fact it's not. Having stable assembler backend and optimizations that keep semantics is not as easy as it might sound.
The current roadmap, as I see it, looks like as following:
- Provide a JIT that does not speedup things, but produce assembler without optimizations turned on, that is correct and able to run CPython's library tests on a nightly basis.
- Introduce simple optimizations, that should make above JIT a bit faster than CPython. With optimizations disabled JIT is producing incredibly dumb assembler, which is slower than correspoding C code, even with removal of interpretation overhead (which is not very surprising).
- Backport optimizations from JIT prototype, one by one, keeping an eye on how they perform and making sure they don't break anything.
- Create new optimizations, like speeding up attribute access.
- Profit.
This way, we can hopefully provide a working JIT, which gives fast python interpreter, which is a bit harder than just a nice prototype.
Tell us what you think about this plan.
Cheers,fijal & others.
