libgccjit and Racket

[Vibhav Pant]

Hi,

Has there been any interest in using libgccjit as a JIT compilation library for Racket? Owing to the library's use of GCC as a code generation backend, libgccjit:

* Supports a wider range of architecture (as compared to GNU lightning)

* Uses a C-like IR to represent code, as opposed to the virtual instruction set used by lightning.

* Allows JIT compilers to generate better optimized code, and generate debugging information for running JIT compiled on a debugger.

The library is still in alpha, but is pretty promising. While I haven't completely understood Racket internals, I would be interested in knowing if any effort towards writing a JIT compiler for Racket using libgccjit is worth it.

Best,

Vibhav Pant

[Paulo Matos]

Hi,

I really like libgccjit. A lot of work has gone into it and it does a
really good job interfacing with gcc. That said, integrating it into
Racket is a _huge_ amount of work. It is nonetheless very interesting
and I would certainly like to see it done.

However, note Racket is moving to running on Chez (Racket-On-Chez). I
imagine if you want to get it run over libgccjit it would be easier to
target Chez. So, in principle if you get Chez-On-GCC, then you can have
Racket-On-Chez-On-GCC. It's a hard project, no doubt about it but
certainly interesting and possibly useful. It might be the case that
there's no way to describe all of Chez features in libgccjit, meaning
you'll have to coordinate with others to get things done.

Good luck,

Paulo Matos

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--
Paulo Matos

[Gustavo Massaccesi]

In both cases, I think there will be a license problem. IIUC the license of libgccjit is GPLv3.

Gustavo

[Paulo Matos]

On 03/11/2018 20:15, Vibhav Pant wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Has there been any interest in using libgccjit as a JIT compilation
> library for Racket?

Vibhav, have you pursued any work in this direction?

--
Paulo Matos

[Paulo Matos]

On 05/11/2018 02:46, Gustavo Massaccesi wrote:
> In both cases, I think there will be a license problem. IIUC the license
> of libgccjit is GPLv3.

I am not a lawyer but Racket is LGPL. LGPL is GPL3 compatible. Am I
missing something?

--
Paulo Matos

[Paulo Matos]

I also confirmed that after the license change [1], we will remain GPL3
compatible - both Apache2 and MIT are GPL3 compatible [2].

[1] https://github.com/racket/racket/issues/1570
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses
--
Paulo Matos

[Paulo Matos]

FYI, I started some do some work on this:
https://github.com/LinkiTools/racket-gccjit

Not ready to be a proper pkg yet though. But it does already JIT an
hello world function (from libgccjit tutorial 1).