Wednesday, April 24, 2013

IonMonkey PowerPC phase 1 complete

Tonight after several weeks of feverish work I finished the basis for IonMonkey PowerPC, the next-generation JavaScript JIT we will be implementing, including bridging our previous assembler (and all Ben's hard work on optimizing branches) to IonMonkey and then writing up the new macroassembler. IonMonkey is all stack, all the time, so there are quite a few differences in implementation (though to the Linux readers in the audience, this may make our IonMonkey backend easier to port to Linux PPC than our current JaegerMonkey/methodjit backend because I can no longer make certain assumptions about how the stack is organized). The old macroassembler still remains as an integral part of YARR and is still used to compile regular expressions.

Phase 2 will be getting it to compile, phase 3 will be getting it to do simple operations, and phase 4 will be getting it to pass the JIT test suite (which if it does means there is an excellent chance it will "just work" in the browser). Please note I am still unconvinced about how well it will perform, though the front end for IonMonkey can optimize code a lot better than JaegerMonkey could, and because it does everything on the stack I hope our 1GB allocation is enough because I don't think we can get any more out of it in 32-bit mode.

Mozilla has at least not laughed uproariously and said "no" with a bone-crushing sound to the plea to keep JM+TI (JaegerMonkey + type inference) in ESR24, even if only as a compile-time option. There is no SPARC ionjit (nor does it look like there will be one), nor MIPS, so those architectures will also lose JIT support when JaegerMonkey is removed, and since it appears that JM+TI's continued existence does not immediately impair work on certain pieces of the ionjit baseline compiler there is less push to remove it right away. This was not the case per se with tracejit back in the ESR10 days where tracejit actively impaired work on type inference. I really don't want to have to unload ionjit on the user base right away; I'd rather have lots of cycles to get it right, and keeping 24 on JM+TI means we have one more full stable release lifecycle on a very dependable engine that's bought us a lot of mileage and plenty more time to get Ion to that same level.

3 comments:

  1. Great! I hope it keeps on going this well.

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  2. Ever heard of the JavaScript based Amiga emulator?
    scriptedamigaemulator.net

    Might be a good JavaScript JIT stress test.
    Will it ever be able to emulate an A500 on a G5 at decent speed? ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I haven't. I'll have to try that on the quad when I get back. I do try the GameBoy emulator regularly and that runs at full speed on the G5 with audio and the whole bit.

    ReplyDelete

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