Floating point optimization patch for OCaml bytecode

Floating point optimization patch for OCaml bytecode

[Jeffrey Mathews]

I know, I know -- why bother optimizing bytecode?  (Compelling reasons
have long been debated -- for me, it's a need to do dynamic- / meta-
programming.)

Anyway, I've written a small patch for the OCaml bytecode compiler and
runtime that significantly improves the performance of a few
floating-point intensive benchmarks (from 30 to 40%) by reducing
boxing and unboxing of intermediate floating point results.

This is still preliminary work, and honestly I'm a little suspicious
that it works so well.  Testing has also been light -- it compiles and
runs my 'benchmark' script when patched against ocaml 3.08.1 and
3.08.4 (as well as MetaOcaml, though the patch needs a little
coaxing).

A short write-up can be found at http://dem.inim.us/ocamlfp/README-FP.html

The patch is found at http://dem.inim.us/ocamlfp/ocamlfp-0.1.diff.gz

I'd greatly appreciate feedback, criticism, testing on other platforms.

Thanks in advance,
Jeff

Re: [Caml-list] Floating point optimization patch for OCaml bytecode

[Damien Guichard]

Thanks Jeffrey.

When OCaml is used as a scripting language (think animation-scripting) it
has to compete with popular scripting language such as Perl, Python, Ruby.
For many people the choice is a tradeoff between language facilities and
implementation performance.
So, yes, bytecode performance matters.

- damien


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeffrey Mathews" <jnamathews@acm.org>
To: <caml-list@inria.fr>
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 1:21 AM
Subject: [Caml-list] Floating point optimization patch for OCaml bytecode


I know, I know -- why bother optimizing bytecode?  (Compelling reasons
have long been debated -- for me, it's a need to do dynamic- / meta-
programming.)

Anyway, I've written a small patch for the OCaml bytecode compiler and
runtime that significantly improves the performance of a few
floating-point intensive benchmarks (from 30 to 40%) by reducing
boxing and unboxing of intermediate floating point results.

This is still preliminary work, and honestly I'm a little suspicious
that it works so well.  Testing has also been light -- it compiles and
runs my 'benchmark' script when patched against ocaml 3.08.1 and
3.08.4 (as well as MetaOcaml, though the patch needs a little
coaxing).

A short write-up can be found at http://dem.inim.us/ocamlfp/README-FP.html

The patch is found at http://dem.inim.us/ocamlfp/ocamlfp-0.1.diff.gz

I'd greatly appreciate feedback, criticism, testing on other platforms.

Thanks in advance,
Jeff

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