Grant Proposal: Rakudo Perl 6 performance analysis tooling

Category: Grants

Comments (10)


+1 from me, Timo has done great work before and what he proposes will be useful to both regular users and core devs alike.


I am a big proponent of this grant. Money will be well spent: Timo is a serious Perl 6 core developer who has proven his worth over and over again. This work is needed and will improve Perl 6 greatly, and it will help other Perl 6 developers to work on Perl 6 even better than before.


+1 from me too. profiler is very important.


+1

Most importantly, this tooling will let other core devs find and fix performance issues in the compiler, so the money spent will go along further than the work outlined in this grant.

timotimo++ knows the codebase well enough to deliver on this grant.


Sounds good to me. +1.


This sounds extremely useful. I’m definitely in favour.


One of the continual gripes about Perl 6 is that it isn't as fast as some would like. Timo's work will greatly improve everyone's ability to make code faster. +1 for sure!


+1 from me -- easier profiling tools would be great for those of us using Perl 6.


I'd very much like to see this work happen.

It's possible to obtain plenty of data on how time and memory are being spent in Perl 6 programs now, and how they are being treated by the optimizer. However, much of the tooling has been written primarily to cater to the immediate needs of those who built it. The memory heap snapshot mechanism is a case in point: I was hunting a nasty managed leak and it was quicker to put together a heap snapshot tool than it would have been to find the problems without it. The instrumented profiler UI is a similar case: it was built rapidly to help us understand the performance of small benchmark programs and give a high level idea of how the optimizer was doing with them, but the UI is too slow for larger programs and it doesn't know how to aggregate data from multiple threads and present that.

Perl 6 language users need better tools to understand performance, and the completion of the work proposed in this grant would be a big step forward. As others have noted, core developers will benefit from the improved tooling also.

Last but not least, Timo is a good person to fund to do this work. He's in the handful of people who have contributed to the MoarVM specializer and JIT, along with many other areas of the VM, and so knows the kinds of things that impact upon the performance of Perl 6 programs. This will be valuable knowledge for delivering useful tools to help others understand program performance.


+1

- elohmrow (sorry, lost my login details)


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