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!

I have also been launched on task #2 by rurban. This task is being tracked by the issue - https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1080

The task basically requires me to optimize PCCMETHODs by omitting run-time calls to --
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);

These calls appear when the pmc2c compiler converts the .pmc files to .c files. The task requires me to correct this overhead by replacing these calls with suitable code. Adding this suitable code, is my objective for this week.

That's all folks! :)