71–80 of 312 posts
Remember, don't think too hard about this stuff. It's better to meditate. You can apparently just telepathically learn this stuff by activating your paraterial lobe which can take 2-nary infos about learn to think about it as more generalized cognitive processes properly. Sharing = caring. I think it's best understood under a generalized ethnographic "utterance" aka linguistic and cultural problem in say a first orde…
Unless I misread the current arm docs, I don't think this is still present in the ISA as of 2020? The whole RISC/CISC thing is long dead anyway, so I don't really mind having something like this on my CPU. Bring on the mill (I don't think it'll set the world on fire if they ever make it to real silicon but it's truly different)
To understand RISC, ignore the acronym it stands for, instead just think fixed-instruction, load-store architecture. That's what RISC really means today. No variable-length instructions. No arithmetic instructions that can take memory operands, shift them, and update their address at the same time.
Emery Berger argues that the systems community should be doing exactly this -- improving infrastructure to run JS and Python workloads: https://blog.sigplan.org/2020/10/12/from-heavy-metal-to-irra... We need to incorporate JavaScript and Python workloads into our evaluations. There are already standard benchmark suites for JavaScript performance in the browser, and we can include applications written in node.js (serv…
However I see all high performance web computing moving to WASM and JavaScipt will exist just as the glue to tie it together. Adding hardware support for this is naive and has failed before (ie. Jazelle, picoJava, etc).
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Not surprising to me to see CPU instructions being added for widely used use cases. Basically, a CPU instruction set maker's job is to perform clustering of the tasks that the CPUs do and accelerate commonly used tasks. If people do a lot of AES, the instruction set maker adds AES extensions. If people do a lot of CRC, they add CRC instructions. If people convert doubles to integers all day in a very JS specific way,…
Can you name any other instructions with the name of a programming language in the actual instruction name? No? Then it seems way more specific than the other examples you listed. So specific that it’s only applicable to a single language and that language is in the instruction name. That’s surprising, like finding an instruction called “python GIL release”.
SPARC processors have tagged add and subtract instructions to help dynamic languages.
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSEPEK_10.0.0...
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Is that significant enough to justify the instruction?
Nothing justifies the prolonging of Javascript torture.
It seems like every 2 months I feel the burn of JS not having more standard primitive types and choices for numbers. I get this urge to learn Rust or Swift or Go which lasts about 15 minutes... until I realize how tied up I am with JS. But I do think one day (might take a while) JS will no longer be the obvious choice for front-end browser development.
IMO: Rust isn't the easiest language to learn, but the investment pays off handsomely and the ecosystem is just wonderful.
EDIT: I meant "to learn" which completely changes the statement :)
SPARC processors have tagged add and subtract instructions to help dynamic languages.
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Consider Node JS is a top server side language, and arm for data centers is coming ( to the extent it's not already here), this makes sense. Technically someone can just make a better VM engine for JavaScript to execute inside of, but whatever I guess they decided this would be easier.
I'd say JS on the mobile ARM devices is 10.000x more common, and thus important, than the NodeJS on ARM servers.
Do you mean JS inside of browsers themselves ? Or JS running in another manner
Emery Berger argues that the systems community should be doing exactly this -- improving infrastructure to run JS and Python workloads: https://blog.sigplan.org/2020/10/12/from-heavy-metal-to-irra... We need to incorporate JavaScript and Python workloads into our evaluations. There are already standard benchmark suites for JavaScript performance in the browser, and we can include applications written in node.js (serv…
Edited to be a touch less strident.