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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#231

Post by xg15 »

azeirah wrote: post #214
mpweiher wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that Wirth's rule for Oberon and/or Pascal? Any optimization introduced has to have sufficient cost vs. benefit ratio that it makes the compiler faster compiling itself.

Ah yes, I remember that rule, I think it's incredibly clever. I believe he had another rule, language updates can only /strip/ features, so the core language will always get smaller and smaller. Brilliant

Intuitively, that doesn't seem clever to me. (You're committing yourself to a less efficient, more clumsy language for the benefit of... what exactly?)

How does that law improve the language without falling into the trap mentioned elsewhere in this thread? (Optimizing for a pleasant "compile experience" at the cost of everything else)

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#233

Post by Kapura »

qznc wrote: post #219
mpweiher wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Damn, are we doing this wrong? Yes, and I mean "we" as in "this industry". I just recently talked to someone whose Swift framework(s) were compiling at roughly 16 lines per second. Spurred on by Jonathan Blow's musings on compile times for Jai[1], I started tinkering with tcc a little. It compiled a generated 200KLOC file (lots of small functions) in around 200 ms. Then there are Smalltalk and Lisp systems that are…

I'm not sure if the approach of Lisp and Jai (and also D) is the best one. They all have practically arbitrary code execution at compile time, so they can be arbitrarily slow to compile. In C++ template-programming is so hard that few people do it, but in those languages it is just as easy as normal code. With mainstream languages, code generation is done by the build system which can avoid repetition. Caching genera…

It seems that, in Jai, arbitrary code execution at compile time is exactly the point. The build file itself is just another Jai program. It's easy to wring one's hands about a novice programmer making the computer do unnecessary work, but Blow's philosophy seems to be to trust the programmer to understand the code they're writing. And if they don't, they should probably be using another language.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#234

Post by rwmj »

rbehrends wrote: post #210
rwmj wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml uses C's linker model, and yet still manages to have working Modula-like modules (even with cross-module inlining). So there's an existence proof that it's possible to do it well.

Well, that comes with a few caveats: 1. OCaml generates additional information that it stores in .cmi/.cmx files. 2. OCaml does not allow for mutual dependencies between modules, even in the linking stage. Object files must be provided in topologically sorted order to the linker. 3. OCaml supports shared generics, which cuts down on the amount of code replication (at the expense of requiring additional boxing and tag…

All true except #3 (partially).

> 1. OCaml generates additional information that it stores in .cmi/.cmx files.

On this point I'd say that it could probably embed the cmx file as "NOTE" sections in the ELF object files, but likely they didn't do it that way because it's easier to make it work cross-platform. Every "pre-compiled header" system I've seen generates some kind of extra file of compiled data which you have to manage, so I don't think this is a roadblock.

> 2. OCaml does not allow for mutual dependencies between modules, even in the linking stage. Object files must be provided in topologically sorted order to the linker.

I believe this is to do with the language rather than to do with modules? For safety reasons, OCaml doesn't allow uninitialized data to exist.

Although (and I say this as someone who likes OCaml) it does sometimes produce contortions where you have to split a natural module in order to satisfy the dependency requirement. I've long said that OCaml needs a better system for hierarchical modules and hiding submodules (better than functors, which are obscure for most programmers).

> 3. [...] at the expense of requiring additional boxing and tagged integers [...]

I think this is fixed by OCaml GADTs: https://blogs.janestreet.com/why-gadts-matter-for-performanc... However this is a new feature and maybe not everyone is using it so #3 is still a fair point.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#235

Post by zx2c4 »

titzer wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I work for Google on Chrome. A Chrome build is truly a computational load to be reckoned with. Without the distributed build, a from-scratch build of Chrome will take at least 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour(!). TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma. Even on a hefty workstation, a full build is a go-for-lunch kind of interruption. It will absolutely own a…

> TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma.

I have! Every time you guys bump a snapshot, my Gentoo boxes whirl away and heat my house, compiling a new version from scratch. On an octocore Skylake Xeon laptop, this takes 2 hours 48 minutes.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#236

Post by [deleted] »

blunte wrote: post #37

This is great work. I hope MS can improve Windows 10 by fixing this. I just added a new Win10 laptop with much better specs than my 3 year old rMBP, and I'm shocked by how much apparently random latency I experience with the UI in Windows 10 compared to the Mac. That's not to mention the issues of sloppier track pad (which constantly detects my left hand while I type) or the ungodly slow unzip (via 7z). If only Apple…

[deleted]

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#237

Post by rwmj »

pjmlp wrote: post #205
rwmj wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml uses C's linker model, and yet still manages to have working Modula-like modules (even with cross-module inlining). So there's an existence proof that it's possible to do it well.

Where can I learn more about it in a high level way instead of delving into source code? I am curious how it is done in a portable way across all OSes, specially crude system linkers and OSes without POSIX semantics. For example, I imagine this can be made via ELF sections, but not all OSes use ELF.

These links explain the extra files: https://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/filenames.html https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/the-compiler-frontend-... https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/the-compiler-backend-b...

The cmx data could be converted to ELF note sections, but the whole thing has to work on Windows as well, so I guess they didn't want to depend on ELF.

In most projects, you can add this to your Makefile and forget about it:

    .mli.cmi:
            ocamlfind ocamlc $(OCAMLFLAGS) $(OCAMLPACKAGES) \
                -c $

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#238

Post by copperred »

titzer wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I work for Google on Chrome. A Chrome build is truly a computational load to be reckoned with. Without the distributed build, a from-scratch build of Chrome will take at least 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour(!). TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma. Even on a hefty workstation, a full build is a go-for-lunch kind of interruption. It will absolutely own a…

The important question is: how long does an incremental build take? The time to perform a full clean build is important but clean builds are rarely a part of my development flow. In my experience, efforts to reduce build time focus first on the incremental case, and rightly so.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#239

Post by Eridrus »

ericfrederich wrote: post #227

I had the same exact problem. A machine that is overkill spec wise but the mouse and keyboard would freeze up every minute on the minute. I tracked it down to my desktop wallpaper being on a rotation. Seriously... how bad does that have to be implemented in Windows to actually hang the mouse and keyboard?

For all the hate Windows gets, UI lockup hasn't really been a pervasive issue for me in years, whereas on my Linux desktop that's just a typical day.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#240

Post by FridgeSeal »

taw55 wrote: post #147
jonathanstrange wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Linux for my daily work for more than ten years now and develop for MacOS since around 2000, and I honestly cannot confirm this. If you have a fast and well-tuned machine, the sluggishness of modern applications might not be so notable, but it surely is there, and then there are also many usability issues of desktop software on Linux. Not to speak of browser-based applications, which mostly have unusable us…

Good luck on improving the situation as long as you have people running around who consider this all fine and normal. https://ptrthomas.wordpress.com/2006/06/06/java-call-stack-f...

Looking through that graph like "you know what we need? More abstractions!"
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