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Comment by AstralStorm | Hacker News Reader

The real question is why would you use it instead of mature LLVM.

It seems to solve a different usecase. LLVM is (by their own documentation) not really intended for ad-hoc JIT compilation for queries. It doesn't put a lot of priority on making the compilation fast (but rather makes the produced code fast).

On top of that, LLVM is a massive dependency.

I only looked at NativeJIT a few minutes but it seems to solve both of these issues. It's pretty small in terms of API surface // total amount of code and is explicitly designed for a usecase where compilation happens as part of a user-issued query (that needs to be fast).

LLVM is a fairly heavyweight tool to use for simplistic or really frequent JIT use-cases. There is definitely room for smaller and simpler tools for that purpose, imo. Like, I'm pretty sure LuaJIT runs rings around LLVM in terms of how quickly it generates code, but at the cost of doing considerably less optimization. This is sometimes a useful tradeoff.

> I'm pretty sure LuaJIT runs rings around LLVM in terms of how quickly it generates code, but at the cost of doing considerably less optimization. This is sometimes a useful tradeoff.

You can't really compare LuaJIT and LLVM directly, because LuaJIT is a trace compiler. A LuaJIT trace is a linear sequence of instructions with no control flow, which makes optimization much easier. LLVM on the other hand is statically compiling code consisting of many basic blocks and potentially complicated control flow between them.

So LLVM's job is much harder. LuaJIT's optimizer doesn't have to work nearly as hard to get a similar quality of code.

Because LLVM isn't a JIT in the sense of PyPy, the JVM or Lua. It is more in the sense of the CLR, a late bound AoT compiler. It doesn't watch data access patterns, it doesn't watch arms of a switch statement, there is no feedback.

"but at the cost of doing considerably less optimization"

That's arguable. Ravi[1] is a Lua implemented with an LLVM-based JIT. The benchmarks here[2] compare runtime performance of Ravi vs. LuaJIT. The Ravi timings don't include compilation time, the LuaJIT timings do. Sometimes LuaJIT siginficantly outperforms Ravi, sometimes it's on par, sometimes worse. But the results don't suggest that there is less (effective) optimisation going on.

[1] https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ravi

[2] http://the-ravi-programming-language.readthedocs.io/en/lates...

I think it's a bit more complex than that. I'm pretty sure that LLVM does use more optimisation passes and techniques than LuaJIT's backend, however LuaJIT optimises with knowledge of the semantics of Lua, whereas LLVM optimises as if it was optimising something like C.

The parent post is correct. LLVM's optimizations are low-level optimizations tuned for C and C++. By contrast, the optimizations you want to do for dynamic languages (and high-level languages in general) are high-level optimizations that are better done on language-specific IRs. Moreover, dynamic languages need dynamic optimizations such as polymorphic inline caching, speculation and bailouts with on stack replacement, etc.

Optimization pipelines are invariably language-specific. If you were to somehow make LuaJIT into a C/C++ compiler without doing any work on its optimizer, you would get similarly poor results.

True. Although, LuaJIT does pretty well on C-style code using its FFI library. But that's something it's designed for, so not really surprising.

> If you were to somehow make LuaJIT into a C/C++ compiler

Clang -> Sulong -> Java bytecode -> Luje [1]? May need more turtles :)

Technically, one reason -of several- this probably wouldn't work without significant effort is that Sulong relies on Graal's FFI intrinsics. But those should be convertible to LuaJIT FFI calls (in theory).

[1] https://cowlark.com/luje/

The same reason regex engines have their own specific JIT emitters. Limited overhead and size constraints because it's not a strict requirement to pre-compile regexes. It's basically a native dialect of existing automaton generators, where the abstract code is replaced with machine instructions.

It sounds like this is both high-throughput and low-latency. I trust LLVM is high-throughput but I imagine it's got a bit of overhead in starting up.

LLVM is neither high-throughput nor low-latency. It does probably generate faster code, though.

Surely LLVM is high-throughput? Otherwise your dev-test cycle of edit/compile/run would suffer from long compilation/link times.

It's "acceptable-throughput" for that use case, and you can balance the tradeoffs of compilation time to optimisation (for time or code size) by adding -On parameters. That's a very different kind of throughput to "compile small functions many times per second".

These are different metrics of throughput. I'd expect NativeJIT to be 100x to 1000x (or possibly more) faster than LLVM for its use case: temporary expressions measured in low 100s of bytes, no loops, no expression-visible side effects.

GNU lightning would be a better choice. However, it does not optimize.

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