11–20 of 21 posts
Mike Pall is without doubt one of the most talented developers of our generation, alongside people like Fabrice Bellard and Jeff Dean (to name a few).
LuaJIT is a work of great beauty and efficiency. I've been working on a commercial product for small ARM boards where rapid prototyping has been essential because of ever changing requirements but the speed of the finished code is also paramount. LuaJIT has made this project an absolute pleasure. It wraps C libraries cleanly, it runs within 5-10% of native code speed on the ARM (I checked because I didn't believe it…
Now does Mike have any kids? Start pointing them in the direction of Rust, por favor :)
LuaJIT is a work of great beauty and efficiency. I've been working on a commercial product for small ARM boards where rapid prototyping has been essential because of ever changing requirements but the speed of the finished code is also paramount. LuaJIT has made this project an absolute pleasure. It wraps C libraries cleanly, it runs within 5-10% of native code speed on the ARM (I checked because I didn't believe it…
The most interesting conclusions of Mike Pall reflect my experiences: sampling profilers are often much more usable in practice than instrumentation: As you might have noticed, I had to change my plans compared to the original approach presented in June. The main problem with the instrumenting profiler was finding high-precision and high-speed timing sources for all platforms. (...) The necessary pipeline flushes sha…
The most interesting conclusions of Mike Pall reflect my experiences: sampling profilers are often much more usable in practice than instrumentation: As you might have noticed, I had to change my plans compared to the original approach presented in June. The main problem with the instrumenting profiler was finding high-precision and high-speed timing sources for all platforms. (...) The necessary pipeline flushes sha…
Also, Julia has a built-in sampling profiler (built by Tim Holy):
http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/stdlib/profile/
Hard to say whether Julia qualifies as a "scripting language" though – that's a pretty meaningless term these days.
The most interesting conclusions of Mike Pall reflect my experiences: sampling profilers are often much more usable in practice than instrumentation: As you might have noticed, I had to change my plans compared to the original approach presented in June. The main problem with the instrumenting profiler was finding high-precision and high-speed timing sources for all platforms. (...) The necessary pipeline flushes sha…
python
You can thank GIANTS Software for this one: http://luajit.org/sponsors.html
GIANTS Software GmbH is sponsoring the development of a low-overhead profiling functionality for LuaJIT 2.1, starting in June 2013. GIANTS Software develops a variety of simulation games for desktop, mobile and consoles. These games make extensive use of Lua for scripting and modding. Switching to LuaJIT was instrumental in reducing the CPU load and sustaining the required frame rates on all platforms.
Existing profilers for Lua and LuaJIT are based on Lua hooks and debug queries. The use of these generic mechanisms incurs a high overhead. Execution of a program under control of such a profiler causes substantial slow-downs. Actual use of the program (gameplay) may be impossible in some cases.
The goal is to design and implement a new profiling functionality that has a much lower overhead, better control of detail and high flexibility.
Great news, up until now there was no good Lua profiler. You can thank GIANTS Software for this one: http://luajit.org/sponsors.html GIANTS Software GmbH is sponsoring the development of a low-overhead profiling functionality for LuaJIT 2.1, starting in June 2013. GIANTS Software develops a variety of simulation games for desktop, mobile and consoles. These games make extensive use of Lua for scripting and modding. S…
Great news, up until now there was no good Lua profiler. You can thank GIANTS Software for this one: http://luajit.org/sponsors.html GIANTS Software GmbH is sponsoring the development of a low-overhead profiling functionality for LuaJIT 2.1, starting in June 2013. GIANTS Software develops a variety of simulation games for desktop, mobile and consoles. These games make extensive use of Lua for scripting and modding. S…
It kind of astounds me how many previous sponsors are anonymous. (Well, sponsored features, I should say. I guess it could be the same one anonymous sponsor.) I'd be interested to know, just in general terms, what kind of real-world situation(s) there are where the downside to being public about this is greater than the goodwill/respect they would get for doing it. Maybe they do not want to be known as a company will…