Truffle Splitting Heuristics cause compilation to never stabilize

[Stefan Marr]

Hi:

I have been running into a stabilizing issue with a small benchmark from the Newspeak benchmark suite.

The issue exists however also in other languages.
Let’s take Ruby as example, which might be more legible:

def fib(x)
  -> n {
    if n < 2
      1
    else
      fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
    end
  }.call(x)
end

loop { fib(25) }

The main problem here is that we have an indirectly recursive function, which itself has only a single call.

This means, DefaultTruffleSplittingStrategy will see fib and say hey isMaxSingleCall==true, let’s split it.
In the block itself, fib is then split again and again, because it is not directly recursive, but one indirection removed. So, the recursion heuristic doesn’t trigger.

In my Newspeak (SOMns), the problem is further exaggerated because when a method gets split, I also split its embedded blocks to allow type specialization of local variables. This isn’t the case in TruffleRuby however.

Is there anything that could be done to make DefaultTruffleSplittingStrategy a little smarter about this?

Thanks
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Marr
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
http://stefan-marr.de/research/