Hum, I read again my old REGISTERVM.txt that I wrote a few years ago. A little bit more context. In my "registervm" fork I also tried to implement further optimizations like moving invariants out of the loop. Some optimizations could change the Python semantics, like remove "duplicated" LOAD_GLOBAL whereas the global might be modified in the middle. I wanted to experiment such optimizations. Maybe it was a bad idea to convert stack-based bytecode to register-based bytecode and experiment these optimizations at the same time. Victor Le mar. 26 févr. 2019 à 22:42, Victor Stinner <vstinner@redhat.com> a écrit :
No, I wasn't aware of this project. My starting point was:
http://static.usenix.org/events/vee05/full_papers/p153-yunhe.pdf Yunhe Shi, David Gregg, Andrew Beatty, M. Anton Ertl, 2005
See also my email to python-dev that I sent in 2012: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-November/122777.html
Ah, my main issue was my implementation is that I started without taking care of clearing registers when the stack-based bytecode implicitly cleared a reference (decref), like "POP_TOP" operation.
I added "CLEAR_REG" late in the development and it caused me troubles, and the "correct" register-based bytecode was less efficient than bytecode without CLEAR_REG. But my optimizer was very limited, too limited.
Another implementation issue that I had was to understand some "implicit usage" of the stack like try/except which do black magic, whereas I wanted to make everything explicit for registers. I'm talking about things like "POP_BLOCK" and "SETUP_EXCEPT". In my implementation, I kept support for stack-based bytecode, and so I had some inefficient code and some corner cases.
My approach was to convert stack-based bytecode to register-based bytecode on the fly. Having both in the same code allowed to me run some benchmarks. Maybe it wasn't the best approach, but I didn't feel able to write a real compiler (AST => bytecode).
Victor
Le mar. 26 févr. 2019 à 21:58, Neil Schemenauer <nas-python@python.ca> a écrit :
On 2019-02-26, Victor Stinner wrote:
I made an attempt once and it was faster: https://faster-cpython.readthedocs.io/registervm.html
Interesting. I don't think I have seen that before. Were you aware of "Rattlesnake" before you started on that? It seems your approach is similar. Probably not because I don't think it is easy to find. I uploaded a tarfile I had on my PC to my web site:
http://python.ca/nas/python/rattlesnake20010813/
It seems his name doesn't appear in the readme or source but I think Rattlesnake was Skip Montanaro's project. I suppose my idea of unifying the local variables and the registers could have came from Rattlesnake. Very little new in the world. ;-P
Cheers,
Neil
-- Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death.
-- Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death.