[pypy-svn] extradoc extradoc: kill part about unroll_safe and dont_look_inside. We have a space-problem and

[cfbolz]

Author: Carl Friedrich Bolz <cfbolz at gmx.de>
Branch: extradoc
Changeset: r3395:9088f6507a98
Date: 2011-03-24 15:21 +0100
http://bitbucket.org/pypy/extradoc/changeset/9088f6507a98/

Log:	kill part about unroll_safe and dont_look_inside. We have a space-
	problem and this material is not that important.

diff --git a/talk/icooolps2011/paper.tex b/talk/icooolps2011/paper.tex
--- a/talk/icooolps2011/paper.tex
+++ b/talk/icooolps2011/paper.tex
@@ -149,145 +149,6 @@
 in the user program.
 
 
-\subsection{How Far Should Tracing Go}
-
-When the tracer encounters a function call at the interpreter level, e.g. the
-interpreter main loop calling a helper function, it can do one of two things:
-
-\begin{enumerate}
-\item it can trace into the helper function, effectively inlining it into the trace.
-
-\item it can not trace into the function and instead record a call to that function
-as an operation in the trace. Such a call operation in the trace is sometimes
-called \emph{residual call}.
-\end{enumerate}
-
-As a default, the tracer will try to trace into the helper because that will
-give more information to the optimizer, allowing it to do a better job. This is
-particularly important for the allocation removal optimization, because if a
-freshly allocated object is passed as an argument to a residual call, its
-allocation cannot be optimized away.
-
-There is a problem however if the helper function itself contains a loop. The
-tracer records the linear sequence of operations that are being executed. Thus
-when it encounters a loop on the interpreter level it records all the
-operations of every iteration of the loop itself, with the net effect of
-unrolling it. The only places where the tracer stops and tries to close the
-trace is in the main loop of the interpreter. When the tracer encounters the
-main loop, it also checks whether the original user loop has been closed, and
-thus whether it can stop tracing.
-
-For most helper functions in the interpreter that contain loops, fully
-unrolling does not make sense. If a loop is unrolled, the trace is specific to
-the number of iteration that was seen during tracing. If the trace is later
-executed with a different number of iterations, the trace will be left via a
-guard failure, which is inefficient. Therefore the default behaviour of the
-tracer is to never trace into a function on the interpreter level that contains
-a loop, but to trace into all non-looping helper functions.
-
-This default behaviour is essentially a heuristic, but one that usually makes
-sense. We want to produce just enough traces to make the resulting code
-efficient, but not more. Therefore we trace as much as possible (everything by
-default) except the functions which loops where tracing would produce code that
-is less general than it could be.
-
-As an example for a helper with a loop, take string concatenation. It loops over
-the characters of both arguments and copies them over into the result string. It
-does not make sense to unroll the loops in this function. If we do that,
-the resulting trace can only be used for strings of the length that was seen
-during tracing. In practise, the string lengths are usually different each run,
-meaning that the trace with unrolling is not run to completion in most cases.
-
-
-\subsection{Influencing the Default Behaviour}
-
-Sometimes the default behaviour is not actually what is wanted. This is
-something the interpreter author has to decide, usually by looking at the traces
-that are produced and deciding that they should be improved. There are two ways
-in which the default is wrong:
-%
-\begin{itemize}
-
-\item \textbf{false negatives:} if a helper function that \textbf{does} contain a loop should
-be traced into, unrolling the loop.
-
-\item \textbf{false positives:} if a helper function that \textbf{does not} contain a loop is
-inlined into the trace, but the interpreter author decides that this is not
-helpful.
-
-\end{itemize}
-
-If the interpreter author finds false negatives or false positives, she can fix
-that by applying a hint to the tracer. These hints take the form of function
-decorators (which both live in the \Verb|pypy.rlib.jit| module). In the next two
-subsections we describe these two function decorators and their use.
-
-
-\subsubsection{Unrolling Functions With Loops}
-
-The first decorator, used to fix false negatives, is the \texttt{unroll\_safe}
-decorator. It is used to tell the tracer to always trace into a function that
-has a loop, effectively unrolling the loop. This decorator should be used only
-if the loop in the helper function is expected to always run for the same number
-of iterations. This sounds like a strong restriction, in practise this is less
-severe: The number of iterations needs to only be the same \emph{in the context where
-the helper functions is traced from}.
-
-It is easiest to understand this condition via an example. Let's look at the
-\texttt{BUILD\_TUPLE} bytecode in Python. It takes one argument, the length \texttt{n} of
-the tuple being built. The bytecode pops \texttt{n} arguments from the stack, turns
-them into a tuple and pushes that tuple on the stack. Thus the function that
-implements \texttt{BUILD\_TUPLE} in PyPy's Python interpreter calls a helper
-\texttt{popvalues} which pops \texttt{n} values from the stack and returns them in a list.
-This helper is implemented with a loop and would thus not be traced into by
-default.  The loop in the helper can run for very different numbers of
-iterations, because it is used in a variety of places. However, for every
-concrete \texttt{BUILD\_TUPLE} bytecode, the argument will be constant. Therefore it
-is safe (and even necessary) to annotate \texttt{popvalues} with the \texttt{unroll\_safe}
-decorator.
-
-A different example is the implementation of the \texttt{isinstance} builtin. It is
-used to check whether an object \texttt{a} is an instance of a class \texttt{B} like
-this: \texttt{isinstance(a, B)}. The second argument of the function can also be a
-tuple of classes to check whether an object is an instance of one of a number of
-classes: \texttt{isinstance(a, (A, B, C, D))}. To implement this second case, the
-implementation of \texttt{isinstance} contains a loop iterating over the elements of
-the tuple. The number of loop iterations can vary, but is usually fixed for each
-individual call site which typically just lists a few classes in the source
-code. Therefore it is also safe to annotate the implementation of \texttt{isinstance}
-with the \texttt{unroll\_safe} decorator.
-
-
-\subsubsection{Preventing the Tracing of Functions}
-
-The second decorator \texttt{dont\_look\_inside} is used to fix false positives. It
-tells the JIT to never trace into the decorated function and just always produce
-a residual call instead. This decorator is in many ways less important than the
-unrolling one (except for a special situation that is described in
-Section XXX). It is used if tracing into a function is not expected to yield
-any speed benefits, because the optimizer will not be able to improve it much.
-This is often the case if the called helper function does not contain any
-``dynamic'' behaviour. In such a situation it is better to just leave the function
-call in the trace, because that produces less code.
-
-An example would be the import mechanism in Python. It's very unlikely that any
-performance improvement can be had by turning part of it into assembler.
-Therefore we hide it from the tracer by annotating them with
-\texttt{dont\_look\_inside}.
-
-
-\subsection{Conclusion}
-
-In this section we discussed two hints that can be used to control precisely which
-parts of the interpreter should be meta-traced. If these hints are used
-carefully, this can go a long way to making the interpreter produce traces that
-contain exactly the interesting part of the execution, and will contain calls to
-the functions that can not be optimized by tracing techniques.
-
-In the next section we discuss a different set of hints that can
-be used to strongly optimize traces.
-
-%___________________________________________________________________________
 
 \section{Controlling Optimization}