faster closures in Scala via stack-allocation

[Miguel Garcia]

Some brainstorm-level notes on accelerating closures (including but not only via MethodHandles)

  http://lamp.epfl.ch/~magarcia/ScalaCompilerCornerReloaded/2012Q4/2012-11-04-FasterClosures.pdf

Comments are welcome!


Miguel

[Nils Kilden-Pedersen]

Awesometastic!

 

Miguel

[Peter Empen]

Hi Miguel,

just out of curiosity, since you are going for performance, can you spot any use cases for sun.misc.unsafe or something similar in Scala-land?

Peter

[Miguel Garcia]

I guess there must be opportunities for sun.misc.Unsafe, but I'd try first with what works for as many runtime environments as possible. Afterwards, fine tuning can start.

Right now we're getting closures doing too much pointer-chasing all over the heap. Any improvement there will be noticed immediately. Not that we're the only ones: here are two examples from Javascript VMs

  Grokking V8 closures for fun (and profit?)
    http://mrale.ph/blog/2012/09/23/grokking-v8-closures-for-fun.html

  Notes from the JS pit: closure optimization
    http://blog.cdleary.com/2010/05/notes-from-the-js-pit-closure-optimization/


Miguel
http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~magarcia/ScalaCompilerCornerReloaded/