[Python-Dev] Register-based VM [Was: Possible performance regression]

[David Mertz]

Parrot got rather further along than rattlesnake as a register based VM. I
don't think it every really beat CPython in speed though.

http://parrot.org/

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:57 PM Neil Schemenauer <nas-python at arctrix.com>
wrote:

> On 2019-02-27, Victor Stinner wrote:
> > The compiler begins with using static single assignment form (SSA) but
> > then uses a register allocator to reduce the number of used registers.
> > Usually, at the end you have less than 5 registers for a whole
> > function.
>
> In case anyone is interested on working on this, I dug up some
> discussion from years ago.  Advice from Tim Peters:
>
>     [Python-Dev] Rattlesnake progress
>     https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-February/020172.html
>     https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-February/020182.html
>     https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-February/020146.html
>
> Doing a prototype register-based compiler in Python seems like a
> good idea.  Using the 'compiler' package would give you a good
> start.  I think this is the most recent version of that package:
>
>     https://github.com/pfalcon/python-compiler
>
> Based on a little poking around, I think it has not been updated for
> the 16-bit word code.  Shouldn't be too hard to make it work though.
>
> I was thinking about the code format on the weekend.  Using
> three-register opcodes seems a good idea.   We could could retain
> the 16-bit word code format.  For opcodes that use three registers,
> use a second word for the last two registers.  I.e.
>
>     <8 bit opcode><8 bit register #>
>     <8 bit register #><8 bit register #>
>
> Limit the number of registers to 256.  If you run out, just push and
> pop from stack.  You want to keep the instruction decode path in the
> evaluation loop simple and not confuse the CPU branch predictor.
>
> Regards,
>
>   Neil
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list
> Python-Dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
> Unsubscribe:
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/mertz%40gnosis.cx
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20190311/55e4f538/attachment.html>