Re: [Caml-list] ANN: BER MetaOCaml N104, for OCaml 4.04.0

[Eray Ozkural <examachine@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 12:20 AM, Oleg <oleg@okmij.org> wrote:

>
> > Have you ever designed at length how to implement a super fast
> > *interpreted* version of metaocaml, or let me put it this way: do you
> > think if that is possible at all?
>
> I guess you are asking about the complexity and overhead of building
> code representations (because otherwise, MetaOCaml is an ordinary
> OCaml program, and could be optimized as such). Code values have a
> somewhat complex representation because they also describe all
> future-stage free variables that occur within the value. The data
> structure used to represent free variable is designed to be
> efficient. Long time ago I did a spot test of generating code with 100
> free variables. I could not detect any overhead due to the handling of
> free variables. Thus in my experience, MetaOCaml-specific overhead is
> rather negligible. If there is a real need to get MetaOCaml to generate
> code as fast as possible, one should optimize MetaOCaml as any other
> OCaml program.


Yes, I might also be asking about the complexity of designing an extremely
fast / ideal runtime system. [Ocaml's bytecode and interpreter is nice, but
it is not quite what I would do. Anyhow, that's off-topic.]

I'm glad to hear there isn't major overhead with free variables, that would
be a potential bottleneck. That's quite nice and encouraging.

>
> You may also be asking about the performance of Runcode.run.  It
> includes compiling the code and running the resulting
> bytecode. Compilation does impose overhead. How to reduce it is a
> complex question. For now I remark that the generated code is usually
> rather simple. One could compile it with rather old version of OCaml,
> which was really fast.
>

I did think at length on how to do that with code generated on the fly. It
seemed like there is some unavoidable costs associated with the usual, like
type-checking of course. I had considered metaocaml for my AGI codebase
once, now I will think again, thanks for your remarks. My code is written
in ocaml, so I do try to evaluate every significant ocaml technology
developed. Let's stay at the cutting edge, and many thanks for your awesome
contributions again!

https://github.com/metaocaml/ber-metaocaml/blob/ber-n104/metalib/runcode.ml

Celebrating Oleg's cyber poetry here ^_^

Best,

-- 
Eray Ozkural, PhD. Computer Scientist
Founder, Gok Us Sibernetik Ar&Ge Ltd.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ai-philosophy

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