Efficient function composition with Truffle

[Timothy Baldridge]

Thanks for the info! No, I simply wasn't seeing any information about this
in the documentation. On that subject, how would I know this from the docs?
Almost everything I can read on Truffle is either super high-level "Truffle
merges Nodes, and look, you can be polyglot on the JVM!", or is something
like the API docs that are so low level it's hard to know how it all fits
together.

On Sun, Jan 20, 2019 at 2:07 PM Chris Seaton <chris.seaton at oracle.com>
wrote:

> Truffle automatically splits methods that have become megamorphic.
>
> Splitting means that multiple copies are made which can specialise
> independently with independent inline caches. Splitting can be recursive.
> It happens based on heuristics that looks at how many specialisation your
> node are actually using and similar properties, and can be tweaked by the
> language implementor if needed, or forced or disabled.
>
> This is a major advantage over implementing languages on the JVM in the
> conventional way, where, as you say, higher order methods quickly become
> megamorphic. The effect is particularly strong in languages like Ruby where
> many control structures are method calls.
>
> Are you not seeing splitting working automatically already? You should see
> references to ’split’ in -Dgraal.TraceTruffleCompilation=true.
>
> Chris
>
> > On 20 Jan 2019, at 20:52, Timothy Baldridge <tbaldridge at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Something that I haven't figured out yet in my studies of Truffle, is the
> > best way to deal with higher-order functions in a Truffle language. Let's
> > say we have a function like comp from Clojure:
> >
> > (defn comp [a b]
> >  (fn inner [x]
> >    (a (b x))))
> >
> > The semantics here are fairly simple, comp takes two functions and
> composes
> > them. A problem in on the JVM (and I think in Truffle) is that these call
> > sites quickly become megamorphic. There may be thousands of functions in
> a
> > runtime, and so if comp is used a lot, the callsites in the inner
> function
> > (calls to a and b) have to become indirect.
> >
> > This problem exists in may situations, for example with reduce:
> >
> > (defn sum [coll]
> >  (reduce + 0 coll))
> >
> > Reduce may be called in many places in the runtime, but in this specific
> > case, the callsite that invokes + can be monomorphic.
> >
> > So what's the best way to code this sort of thing? Do I manually clone
> AST
> > trees that use higher-order-functions? Is there some sort of feature in
> > Truffle that allows me to say "duplicate this entire AST whenever this
> node
> > changes?"
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Timothy Baldridge
>
>

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