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Re^3: A Just In Time VM for Not Quite Perl

by Anonymous Monk
on Jun 03, 2013 at 03:42 UTC ( [id://1036651]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^2: A Just In Time VM for Not Quite Perl
in thread A Just In Time VM for Not Quite Perl

Hang on..

You still don't give us the complete details. If the JVM effort was underway doesn't it make sense to finish it and then start on something else?

We still don't have a feature complete stable release on one VM. What is the whole point in producing half complete implementations on so many VM's. While efforts could have rather spent on producing one feature complete stable implementation on one VM.

As of now it really looks like there are too many abandoned projects, too many re writes and too many sub project time sinks preventing anything worthwhile to come out of this whole exercise

If anything adding MoarVM to picture now. The entire Perl 6 production release got delayed by another 2 years. Porting Rakudo to MoarVM looks like a 6-8 month exercise and after all that you wouldn't have added a single user facing enhancement to the whole product.

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Re^4: A Just In Time VM for Not Quite Perl
by raiph (Deacon) on Jun 04, 2013 at 08:01 UTC
    If the JVM effort was underway doesn't it make sense to finish it and then start on something else?

    Maybe, but it was the other way around -- MoarVM was started about 8 months before the JVM port was started. The question should properly be, why did they start a JVM port?

    We still don't have a feature complete stable release on one VM.

    Right, but the issue is the "one VM". The Rakudo team have made Rakudo relatively complete, stable, and generating code that ought to be fast. But the "one VM" that Rakudo has been running on, Parrot, is too slow, buggy, and complicated.

    Rewrote next two paragraphs:

    Some history, aiui. After the launch of Rakudo Star in 2010 the Rakudo team increasingly impressed upon the Parrot team that Parrot was a long way from what Rakudo needed, especially speed-wise, and was too heavily burdened with extraneous baggage. By mid 2011 the smoke had cleared and there was a written commitment to Rakudo as the #1 "customer", a strong desire to switch to 6model, and talk of rewriting much of Parrot. However, many contributors bailed in 2011 and by early 2012 the Rakudo team decided they needed to have a backup plan. They still needed a custom VM to realize several central Perl 6 features (not least its potential for unrestricted efficient execution of features like NFG) so existing VMs like the JVM would not cut it. In early 2012 a small group started MoarVM.

    So the remaining questions are things like why wasn't the JVM good enough; conversely, given that they had started MoarVM, why did they chose to start a port to the JVM; why didn't they wait until MoarVM was ready, then port to that, and ignore the JVM until MoarVM was done; why didn't they use an existing lightweight VM or VM kit to build MoarVM? Well, they've given their reasons in blog posts and I find them compelling. YMMV.

    Porting Rakudo to MoarVM looks like a 6-8 month exercise and after all that you wouldn't have added a single user facing enhancement to the whole product.

    The universal user complaint is that Rakudo is far too slow. If they do nothing but radically speed Rakudo up they'll have fixed what Larry Wall has said he thinks is the #1 blocker in the way of mass adoption.

    Update: Fwiw I just visited #moarvm and saw the following fibonacci benchmark comparison:

    $ parrot fib.pir # Parrot fib(28) = 317811 start : 1370329827.014 end : 1370329829.229 end - start: 2.21500015258789 $ perl fib.pl # Perl 5 fib(28) = 317811 start : 1370329768.826 end : 1370329769.45 end - start: 0.624000072479248 $ nqp bench/fib.t # MoarVM fib(28) = 317811 start : 1370329844.736027 end : 1370329845.001228 end - start: 0.265201
      Perl 6 has always been at war with Eastasia, got it!
        Heh. Well, I don't got it!

        Fwiw my rewrite was mostly about replacing some of my opinion with that of Whiteknight (one of the leading Parrot committers in the period since Rakudo Star was first released in 2010).

        Ultimately my goal in posting to the News section of PerlMonks is to inform about new things happening in the Perl world. I hate spin. If you, dear AM, or some other monk PM'd me to explain how I have (or appear to have) inserted spin (beyond the obvious aspect that I updated my comment) I would be very happy. :)

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