Re: Native/VM languages

torbenm@pc-003.diku.dk (Torben =?iso-8859-1?Q?=C6gidius?= Mogensen)
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:30:47 +0200

          From comp.compilers

Related articles
Native/VM languages borophyll@gmail.com (2008-08-25)
Re: Native/VM languages marcov@stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) (2008-08-27)
Re: Native/VM languages ldv@mail.com (ldv@mail.com) (2008-08-27)
Re: Native/VM languages jeremy.wright@microfocus.com (Jeremy Wright) (2008-08-28)
Re: Native/VM languages gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2008-08-28)
Re: Native/VM languages torbenm@pc-003.diku.dk (2008-08-29)
Re: Native/VM languages cr88192@hotmail.com (cr88192) (2008-08-30)
Re: Native/VM languages gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2008-09-03)
| List of all articles for this month |

From: torbenm@pc-003.diku.dk (Torben =?iso-8859-1?Q?=C6gidius?= Mogensen)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:30:47 +0200
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen
References: 08-08-070 08-08-089
Keywords: optimize
Posted-Date: 29 Aug 2008 12:34:25 EDT

Jeremy Wright <jeremy.wright@microfocus.com> writes:




> 2. profile directed feedback is a very powerful optimisation. Dynamic
> compilation does automatically


I can't see this being "automatic" in any normal sense of the word.
It requires an effort to collect and analyse profile data and a good
deal of insight to explout it wisely.


> and does it particularly well because
> the data set used for the profiling is the live run. The standard
> "compile ; run collecting data; recompile with PDF" cycle can suffer
> from artefacts in the data set used to "train" the PDF.


So can dynamic run-time profiling: A program does not have a constant
load during its runtime, so information you collect during the first
half of the execution may be completely wrong in the second half. The
problem is that predicting future behaviour from past behavior is not
always easy (and certainly not perfect). In a sense, information
collected during the same run is late: It only talks about the past,
and you want to compile for the future. Getting profile information
from complete executions can analyse how usage changes over the
execution time of the program and (in theory) use this to make several
variants of teh code for different phases of execution and know when
to switch to new versions.


But all this is about how well you can do in the limit, and that isn't
really interesting. What you want is to know how you get the most
optimisation with a given effort. And I doubt dynamic profile
gathering is the best approach for this.


Torben


Post a followup to this message

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.