Author Archives: jnthnwrthngtn

This evening, I enjoyed the New Year’s fireworks display over the beautiful Prague skyline. Well, the bit of it that was between me and the fireworks, anyway. Rather than having its fireworks display at midnight, Prague puts it at 6pm … Continue reading →

Recently, a Perl 6 object creation benchmark result did the rounds on social media. This Perl 6 code: class Point { has $.x; has $.y; } my $total = 0; for ^1_000_000 { my $p = Point.new(x => 2, y => 3); … Continue reading →

MoarVM’s optimizer can perform speculative optimization. It does this by gathering statistics as the program is interpreted, and then analyzing them to find out what types and callees typically show up at given points in the program. If it spots … Continue reading →

My work on Perl 6 performance continues, thanks to a renewal of my grant from The Perl Foundation. I’m especially focusing on making common basic operations faster, the idea being that if those go faster than programs composed out of them also … Continue reading →

What’s the most common type your Perl 6 code uses? I’ll bet you that in most programs you write, it’ll be Scalar. That might come as a surprise, because you pretty much never write Scalar in your code. But in: my $a = … Continue reading →

Inlining is one of the most important optimizations that MoarVM performs. Inlining lets us replace a call to some Block, Sub, or Method with the code that is inside of it. The most immediate benefit is to eliminate the overhead of calling, but that’s … Continue reading →

In my previous post here, I talked about deoptimization and its implications for usage information. If you didn’t read that post, I suggest reading it before continuing, since the work described in this post builds upon it. Further background on deoptimization and … Continue reading →

I’ve been doing lots of work on the MoarVM specializer of late, and will be writing a few posts here to explain it. This work has been covered by my grant from The Perl Foundation. This post covers the recent addition … Continue reading →

One of the goals for the current round of my Perl Foundation Performance and Reliability grant is to speed up private method calls in roles, as well as assignments in to Scalar containers. What I didn’t expect at the time I wrote the grant … Continue reading →

Some years back, I worked on bringing basic debug support to Rakudo Perl 6. It works by taking the program AST and instrumenting it. This approach produced a somewhat useful result, but also carries a number of limitations: It required … Continue reading →