Memory needed to build Perl 6 on Parrot; problem, goal, incentive for solution

Daniel Arbelo arbelo at gmail.com
Sun Aug 1 16:23:53 UTC 2010


On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 12:01 PM, James E Keenan <jkeen at verizon.net> wrote:
> In the course of discussion in that ticket, I noted that I had been able to
> build Perl 6 on top of Parrot on that same machine at least as late as June
> 2008, when I led a workshop to do that at YAPC::NA in Chicago. Coke
> responded that the file where compilation failed was "the single largest
> compilation that occurs during the process, and requires a LOT of memory,
> and it's likely gotten bigger since the last time you ran." I have 256 MB of
> physical memory available on this machine, to which Coke responded, "Based
> on recent history, I think 1G is the minimum recommend memory for building
> rakudo (for that file in particular)."

As a further data point, before it's disk died on me, my main parrot
development box for the last year was runing OpenBSD i386, and I was
often unable to build Rakudo  with the standard 512 MB memory cap for
my login class.

> I think that lowering the memory required to build Rakudo ought to be an
> explicit goal of both Parrot and Rakudo.  *Do you agree?*

I really can't talk for all of the parrot developers on this, but I
would expect them to agree. I would go as far as saying that we are
already working on it. For example, the latest gc refactor by bacek
(which hasn't landed in trunk yet, pending some performance tuning.)
is all-around less memory hungry than trunk. I would recommend you try
and test-drive that branch and see if it make a difference to you.
Also, as part of my summer of code work in strings, I have started
looking into ways to reduce the memory usage in our string subsytem
(in ways similar to what we have done in the past for PMCs) which is
likely to help on this area as well.
So, while it might take a while for it to get done, and it might get
less attention than the big speedups our optimization gurus usually
get us, parrot's memory footprint is something we care about and work
on.

~darbelo


More information about the parrot-dev mailing list