Rakudo *Needs* Register Allocation

Stefan O'Rear stefanor at cox.net
Sun Jun 27 23:50:18 UTC 2010


On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 02:21:17PM -0700, chromatic wrote:
> Hello C hackers,
> 
> I added some temporary debugging output to CallContext's mark VTABLE to see 
> what's happening in the GC when Rakudo runs.  Look at src/gen/core.pir in the 
> Rakudo directory, and especially the first PIR function (it's _block67 for me).  
> This function has 1425 PMC registers and 76 STRING registers.
> 
> Other interesting functions:
> 
> 	105P/0S (!class_init_1134)
> 	120P/0S (!class_init_722)
> 	1448P/0S (-unknown-)
> 	151P/0S (_block27227)
> 	181P/0S (!class_init_1070)
>         187P/0S (!class_init_1449)
> 	297P/0S (_block13)
> 	301P/0S (_block16799)
> 	324P/0S (_block14638)
> 	395P/0S (_block13)
> 
> Several other functions have 60+ registers.  While sometimes that's necessary, 
> even eyeball lifetime analysis of _block67 in particular reveals that Parrot 
> could get by with far, far fewer registers.  Very few Rakudo calls use more 
> than a handful of S registers, if any.
> 
> I won't *guarantee* that there's a huge runtime speed improvement here (though 
> iterating over dozens of registers in mark won't be fast), but we could cut 
> runtime memory use significantly.  As well, if Parrot could reuse registers 
> after lifetime analysis proved that their contents were unused, we might be 
> able to collect more garbage--especially of locally created GCables which 
> won't escape the function.
> 
> I'm not sure we can save the register allocator in IMCC, nor should we.
> 
> We may be able to add a register allocation step to POST.
> 
> Ideas?

A cheap half-way solution would be to add code to PAST::Compiler to null
temporaries when they are no longer needed.

-sorear
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