Raku Dispatch and Compiler Improvements: Final Grant Report Jonathan Worthington
Thu, 07-Oct-2021 by
Matthias Bloch
edit post
Jonathan completed the work on his grant. The changes were merged into Raku and will be productive in the next Raku release.
We thank the sponsors for supporting this grant, Jonathan for his work; and also the other volunteers who helped with various tasks so this big change could be merged.
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# Raku Dispatch and Compiler Improvements Grant Update
During September, I completed the remaining hours on [my current grant](https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/grant_proposal_raku_dispatch_compiler_improvements).
The key aim of the grant - to bring my work on a new generalized dispatch mechanism to the point where it
could be merged and delivered to Raku users - has been achieved, the merge taking place on 29th September.
I wrote a [blog post](https://6guts.wordpress.com/2021/09/29/the-new-moarvm-dispatch-mechanism-is-here/)
that provides some data on the improvements, as well as identifying future work that can build upon what
has been achieved thus far.
During September, working under the grant, I:
* Implemented specialization and inlining of dispatches that store resume initialization state, to allow
the dispatches to be resumed (for example, if `callsame` is used). This was a critical part of getting
back the level of inlining for method calls and multi dispatches that existed prior to this work, which
is a critical factor in Raku performance.
* Implemented caller-side removal of `Scalar` containers, which in turn avoids various duplicate guards,
leading to much tighter code being produced after specialization and JIT compilation in many common
situations.
* Fixed `Junction` multi-dispatch failover for the case where the `Junction` was in a named argument,
along the way tweaking the semantics to be more consistent with those of positional arguments (there
were some unintended discrepancies in the previous implementation).
* Changed dispatch program compilation to not emit type guards when the types were already proven during
optimization, rather than adding them and relying on them to be optimized out later.
* Reinstated all known missing optimizations from prior to the new dispatch work, and added JIT support
for various new operations introduced during the work.
* Did various modifications to improve startup time, which has regressed. The new dispatch model has
many advantages, however does carry a higher warmup cost.
* Fixed the profiler to work again in programs that use continuations, after changes to the continuation
representation as part of callstack changes.
* Did numerous smaller fixes for bugs identified by `blin` (which runs the tests of all modules in the
ecosystem). In some cases where the modules relied on internals or unspecified behavior, I sent a PR
to the module instead.
The time worked during September was 55 hours and 18 minutes, which was the remaining grant time
available.
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