131–140 of 219 posts
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I hope they are paying you very well.
Government site. They aren't paying James well. Added: if you think I'm joking or being unfair, just look at the compensation tables for just about any government outfit. They top out around a salary that is considered average for software folks in some places.
For those wondering, it's a specializer, applied to an interpreter, to specialize the interpreter into a jit. This is a pretty well explored technique, it's rarely done these days because historically, people could not get good enough performance. (I am not trying to knock them, just put it in context) For more context on how you'd do something like this, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation#Fu…
Isn't this what pypy does? pypy does the specialization at runtime, maybe this does it at (interpreter) compile time?
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I don't know, I'm a fan of the name to be honest, I wouldn't change it just because of the possibility of accidental association.
What about just avoiding needless offence to people who happen to regard the 'holy' morpheme as indicative of ... well ... something holy and not to be trifled with. I don't have religion, but given an essentially infinite number of alternatives to this not-very-funny one, why do this? People also have a right to be idiots in other ways, such as poking hornets' nests because it's funny.
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Ummm... it’s for Firefox... no?
I mean, maybe, in theory, someday. But the browser would still be "Firefox", that is, very few people would even be aware of this name, regardless of what the name is.
The main point was that if they came up with this name without the intention of punning holy shit, I have low confidence in their abilities to succeed in general and with Firefox in particular. But also don’t take this too seriously.
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Isn't this what pypy does? pypy does the specialization at runtime, maybe this does it at (interpreter) compile time?
Given how HolyJIT is implemented (with compiler plugins etc), I believe that it does this work at compile time, yes. I haven't actually confirmed this though.
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my coworker's previous employer blocked all code-sharing and question-and-answer sites for programmers because of a pathological fear of accidental IP dilution. it's a real thing.
That it is, although what they end up doing is making people work on their work machine as well as their cellphone. Source: me, working for a defense contractor with the same insane rules, but no "hand in your phone" rules on entry.
I guess contractors are all over the map in how they try to make sure to comply with the "rules", though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope they are paying you very well.
Government site. They aren't paying James well. Added: if you think I'm joking or being unfair, just look at the compensation tables for just about any government outfit. They top out around a salary that is considered average for software folks in some places.
For what it's worth, the name is obviously a pun and a small wink to the Graal VM [1]. Not sure there's any intention to reference TempleOS's HolyC. [1] https://github.com/graalvm/
It could also be a play on the phrase "Holy shit!"
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Government site. They aren't paying James well. Added: if you think I'm joking or being unfair, just look at the compensation tables for just about any government outfit. They top out around a salary that is considered average for software folks in some places.
I know that that is typical, but there are exceptions, and if you work for the right agency you can be paid well, so I don't want to make any assumptions. If he's not paid well then I hope he realizes that by merely being aware of HN and GitHub puts him in the top 10% of developers and he can do a lot better than working at a place that restricts his ability to educate himself.
For those wondering, it's a specializer, applied to an interpreter, to specialize the interpreter into a jit. This is a pretty well explored technique, it's rarely done these days because historically, people could not get good enough performance. (I am not trying to knock them, just put it in context) For more context on how you'd do something like this, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation#Fu…
These issues, as well as developer velocity in translating VM features into optimized VM features, figure more prominently in our problem set than I would expect it historically did.
We sat down with nbp and went through his proposal in some detail yesterday. I'm reasonably sold on the theoretical soundness of the idea (actually I was excited about it from the first time he proposed it - hand optimizing every new JS feature is soul-sucking, and Graal already demonstrated the feasibility of variant of the concept).
As with any far-reaching idea, though, there are risks associated with it. And we definitely can't rewrite Spidermonkey from scratch.
Personally, I think prototyping the tech on top of a small toy language (objects, properties, proto chains, primitive types, functions), proving out the toy implementation, and then examining how we can incrementalize our transition to HolyJIT is the way to go.
I think a prerequisite is a good codegen backend that we can target. Cretonne is a good candidate, but we need features that aren't on its roadmap - primarily support for on-stack-invalidation.
There's a bit of a road ahead of us on this concept. I think we have a good rough idea of a viable path from here to there, but we are yet in early stages with this.