ZYROz's blog

GSoC 2014 - Final Report

Hey everyone!

I am extremely happy to announce that I have successfully completed my GSoC project!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the community for this wonderful learning experience. It has really helped me to add a new dimension to my knowledge while at the same time introducing me to the world of open-source projects.

Most importantly, I would like to thank my mentor Reini Urban (rurban) for the tremendous help he offered me, ever since my first contact with the community. As a matter of fact, without his ideas and invaluable guidance, completing the project would have been an impossible task. I would also like to thank my co-mentor Bruce Gray (Util) for guiding us throughout the project and providing us with valuable inputs to overcome the many hurdles we faced.

In this blog, I will attempt to summarize the work I have completed through my project.

My project's primary objective was to improve the performance of the method signatures. My project was divided into three tasks:-

GSoC 2014 - Report 12

Hey everyone!

This week I ran the bench test on the three tasks to verify the performance gain. But due to my slow machine, I could only generate varied and unreliable data.

However, rurban confirms that all the tests are passing and the branch pcc-gh1083 is ready to be merged for the Parrot release scheduled on 19 August. Also, he soon plans to test it with a 32 bit machine as well.

GSoC 2014 - Report 11

Hey everyone!

I will be sharing what I have completed this week. Last week, I had mentioned that I would be fixing further problems in my branch to optimize pmc2c (https://www.parrot.org/zyroz10).
I am happy to share that I have successfully completed this work and believe that the issue GH #1083 (https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1083) is now resolved.

To elaborate on the work done --- a couple of weeks back, I started by omitting the obj check in the CallContext ATTR accessors in include/pmc/pmc_callcontext.h.

GSoC 2014 - Report 10

Hey everyone!

This week I completed the part of my task that required me to export the internally needed CallContext vtable methods (https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1083). These exported methods are now included in src/call/*.c to improve the performance, since these methods are now being directly called.

In the previous week, I had finished fixing the headers to omit the obj check for CallContext ATTR accessors. But I had made these changes manually by fixing include/pmc/pmc_callcontext.h.

GSoC 2014 - Report 9

Hey everyone!

Through this post, I will be sharing my progress towards the task - https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1083.

I have completed the part of the task that required me to inline the CallContext ATTR accessors to omit the obj check. For now, I have manually edited include/pmc/pmc_callcontext.h to fix the macro definitions.
However, after completing the remaining task and ascertaining an improvement in speed performance, I plan to improve pmc2c to automatically generate this fix.

GSoC 2014 - Report 8

Hey everyone!

Let me share this week's progress.

Earlier this week, I finished my tests with Parrot for its releases 2.7 - 3.0. Including rurban's profiling, we now have data (reliable to some extent) for the commits in this range. The main objective for the profiling was to determine the highest overhead to be targeted next for refactor.

(For the list of all the identified overheads, please take a look at - http://wiki.enlightenedperl.org/gsoc2014/ideas/improve_performance_of_me...)

GSoC 2014 - Report 7

Hey everyone!

My this week's work involves testing. With this work, we are trying to figure out the commits that slowed down Parrot during its releases 2.7 - 3.0. To do this, I am running the bench.sh tool provided in parrot-bench. rurban is helping me out with these tests to save time (since I have got a slow machine) and also to cross-check results.

GSoC 2014 - Report 6

Hey everyone!

I am happy to announce that my task #2 (https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1080) is now complete and the issue has been closed.

To give a gist of what has been done -

The goal was to optimize the pmc2c compiler, more specifically the PCCMETHODs, by avoiding the run-time overhead of having to call two costly C functions per method call. These C functions were:-

Parrot_pcc_fill_params_from_c_args(interp, _call_object, sig, &_self, args...);
and
Parrot_pcc_set_call_from_c_args(interp, _call_object, rettype, result);

GSoC 2014 - Report 5

Hey everyone!

I will catch you up on my work this week. As I had mentioned in my last post (http://www.parrot.org/zyroz4), I have already started working on a new task (https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1080).

Since, this work requires me to make changes to the Pmc2c compiler, I am required to code in Perl. I am however, new to Perl and thus, spent quite some time getting used to some basic coding in Perl this week.

GSoC 2014 - Report 4

Hey everyone!

Let me share the progress for this week.

I have successfully finished my task #1 that required me to add write barriers to the PMC methods (https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1069).

For this task, I had finished most of the work last week itself (http://www.parrot.org/zyroz3).

This week I mostly verified all the WB annotations for one last time and it did help me to fix some bugs and incorrect WBs. All this work is now part of our latest release for Parrot 6.5.0 and we have achieved a speed improvement of around 2.5% - 5% through this task!

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