minivm
Oberon
minivm | Oberon | |
---|---|---|
13 | 76 | |
1,551 | 427 | |
0.1% | - | |
8.5 | 7.4 | |
5 days ago | about 2 months ago | |
C | C++ | |
MIT License | GNU General Public License v3.0 only |
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minivm
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Show HN: I wrote a WebAssembly Interpreter and Toolkit in C
> I developed a unique way to write interpreters based on threaded code jumps and basic block versioning when I made MiniVM (https://github.com/FastVM/minivm). It was both larger and more dynamic than WebAssembly.
I'd be very interested to read more about this. It looks like you are using "one big function" with computed goto (https://github.com/FastVM/Web49/blob/main/src/interp/interp....). My experience working on this problem led me to the same conclusion as Mike Pall, which is that compilers do not do well with this pattern (particularly when it comes to register allocation): http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg00742.html
I'm curious how you worked around the problem of poor register allocation in the compiler. I've come to the conclusion that tail calls are the best solution to this problem: https://blog.reverberate.org/2021/04/21/musttail-efficient-i...
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Ask HN: Recommendation for general purpose JIT compiler
Maybe take a look at MiniVM[0]? It was on HN a couple months ago[1].
[0]: https://github.com/fastvm/minivm
- MiniVM: “Minivm Port to Dlang”
- MiniVM: A zero-dependency cross-language runtime on par with LuaJIT and C
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Hacker News top posts: Jan 8, 2022
MiniVM: A zero-dependency cross-language runtime on par with LuaJIT and C\ (19 comments)
- MiniVM: A minimal cross-language runtime that beats C/luajit on some benchmarks
Oberon
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Boehm Garbage Collector
> Sure there's a small overhead to smart pointers
Not so small, and it has the potential to significantly speed down an application when not used wisely. Here are e.g. some measurements where the programmer used C++11 and did everything with smart pointers: https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/issues/80#issuecomm.... There was a speed down between factor 2 and 10 compared with the C++98 implementation. Also remember that smart pointers create memory leaks when used with circular references, and there is an additional memory allocation involved with each smart pointer.
> Garbage collection has an overhead too of course
The Boehm GC is surprisingly efficient. See e.g. these measurements: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcase.... The same benchmark suite as above is compared with different versions of Mono (using the generational GC) and the C code (using Boehm GC) generated with my Oberon compiler. The latter only is 20% slower than the native C++98 version, and still twice as fast as Mono 5.
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Niklaus Wirth, or the Importance of Being Simple
Great, thanks!
There are books online for free, e.g.
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProgInOberonWR.pdf
and https://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/Oberon2.pdf
Oberon+ is a superset of Oberon 90 and Oberon-2. Here is more information: https://oberon-lang.github.io/, and here is the current language specification: https://github.com/oberon-lang/specification/blob/master/The.... I already had valuable feedback here on HN concerning the channel extensions. Further research brought me to the conclusion, that Oberon+ should support both, channels and also monitors, because even in Go, the sync package primitives are used twice as much as channels. Mutexes and condition variables can be emulated with channels (I tried my luck here: https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-emulate-mutexes-and-conditi...), but for efficiency reasons I think monitors should be directly supported in the language as well, even if it might collide with the goal of simplicity.
Feel free to comment here or e.g. in https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/discussions/45.
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Tex-Oberon: Make Project Oberon Pretty Again
> Does anyone know why Wirth never modernized his style?
Readability. It's easier to read the source code with uppercase keywords. (I think Wirth once said that code is written once but read many times). See this source code - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem... - to get an idea of this (the uppercase keywords allow you to easily scan the blocks of code). Ofcourse, one can claim that the same can be achieved better today with colour-coded keywords.
If I remember right, the Oberon+ IDE - https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon - gives you an option to disable this and use lowercase keywords.
- FreeOberon cross-platform Oberon language IDD
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Project Oberon (New Edition 2013)
> gain a deep understanding of it .. generate smaller subsets of the system
You can use the OberonViewer for this purpose with the original source code, or the Oberon IDE with a version of the Project Oberon System which runs with SDL on all platforms, see https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon/#binary-versions and https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem/tree/FFI
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KolibriOS on Single Floppy Disk
> Regardless, which one is more likely to be ported to a different architecture in the future?
Not sure I understand the question. I'm talking about CPU architectures. The current implementation is in x86 assembler. So if you want to run it on AMD64 or ARM, then you have to replace all assembler files, in the present case probable the full source code.
> what are the comparative performance benchmarks of the low-level language versus the high-level language?
I don't have any measurements. But consider that many operating systems are implemented in C (e.g. Linux) with only isolated parts in assembler, so it is easier to port to other architectures. Linux apparently is fast enough and available for nearly every CPU. Oberon in contrast to C is garbage collected, which also affects performance. I have measurements comparing the same benchmark suite implemented in C++ and in Oberon, where the former is about 22% faster (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcase...).
- Why Use Pascal?
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C or LLVM for a fast backend?
I actually had a similar problem some years ago and finally moved away from LLVM because of complexity, continuous research effort and performance. My current Oberon+ implementation works like this: the CIL code generator together with Mono is used during development, integrated with the IDE, using the debugging features integrated in Mono; to deploy the application and to gain another factor 2 of performance C99 instead of CIL can be generated and compiled with any compatible toolchain. Here are some performance measurements: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcases/Are-we-fast-yet/Are-we-fast-yet_results_linux.pdf. Compiling to CIL is very fast and the time Mono needs to compile and run is barely noticable.
- Do transpilers just use a lot of string manipulation and concatenation to output the target language?
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Native AOT Overview
> annoying aspects was requiring the .NET runtime ... OpenJDK is a blessed implementation in a way that Mono never was
Which is unjustified, because Mono CLR is just a single executable less than 5 MB which you can download and run without a complicated installation process (see e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/#binary-versions ). AOT compilation on the other hand is a huge and complex installation depending on a lot of stuff including LLVM, and the resulting executables are not really smaller than the CLR + mscorlib + app.
What are some alternatives?
privacytests.org - Source code for privacytests.org. Includes browser testing code and site rendering.
oberon-riscv - Oberon RISC-V port, based on Samuel Falvo's RISC-V compiler and Peter de Wachter's Project Norebo. Part of an academic project to evaluate Project Oberon on RISC-V.
sljit - Platform independent low-level JIT compiler
MoarVM - A VM with adaptive optimization and JIT compilation, built for Rakudo
LuaJIT - Mirror of the LuaJIT git repository
Smalltalk - Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file
paka - Paka language
tectonic - A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine, powered by XeTeX and TeXLive.
asmjit - Low-latency machine code generation
aws-lambda-rust-runtime - A Rust runtime for AWS Lambda
qbe-rs - QBE IR in natural Rust data structures
atldotnet - Fully managed, portable and easy-to-use C# library to read and edit audio data and metadata (tags) from various audio formats, playlists and CUE sheets