[pypy-dev] Second compilation stage

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Hakan,

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Hakan Ardo <hakan at debian.org> wrote:
> there have been a bit of talk on improving loops with control flow,
> i.e. when there is no single dominant path through the loop. To have
> that discussion here let me make the following proposal (based on a
> proposal from Armin):

I proposed nothing more or less than sending our loops to gcc/llvm.
You're suggesting some refactorings of the way loops are produced,
which may make sense or not, but is more than I ever claim to have
proposed :-)

> If it turns out to be necessary, we could later add support for
> handing guards to better support cases where we are unable optimize
> them out.

One quick word, I doubt very strongly that we can hope to remove *all*
guards.  Starting from that assumption looks wrong to me.  In my
opinion we'd be left with a large quantity of guards anyway --- mostly
guards that never failed so far and probably never will, but which
cannot be proven never to fail.  (They would fail in some rare
circumstances like suddenly starting pdb, or some integer computation
overflowing; or, for most of them, you'd need some impossibly clever
global "prover" to check e.g. that this list here cannot be empty or
can only contain objects of this precise type.)


A bientôt,

Armin.