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Higgs: My New Tracing JIT for JavaScript
A few months ago, I made the hard decision to change the direction of my PhD studies. I felt like I’d gotten to a point where I was stalled in my work and the goals of my thesis project had become...
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Sky Blue
A few days ago, I stumbled upon a fascinating piece of information while reading the Wikipedia article about melatonin. I was taught in high school that there were two main types of photoreceptors in...
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Higgs has Exceptions
I just finished implementing exceptions in the Higgs interpreter, complete with support for the finally block and optional catch clauses. The fact that Higgs is an interpreter and tracing JIT instead...
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Turing Drawings
After watching a documentary about Alan Turing, I started thinking about Turing machines again. They’re a very useful tool for computer science proofs and an elegantly simple computational model....
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More Fun with Turing Machines
I have to admit I’m surprised at how nice a reception Turing Drawings received when I linked to my last blog post on Reddit. In only a few days, my blog received over 10K hits, and dozens of redditors...
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Higgs has a Garbage Collector
I just completed the implementation of a garbage collector (GC) for the Higgs JavaScript VM. This brings me much closer to the completion of my interpreter. The GC itself is an almost direct port of...
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Visiting Mozilla
My research team (the Dynamic Language Team) and I are taking a plane to San Francisco today so that we can visit the Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View. This will be an opportunity to show them our...
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Back from Silicon Valley
How Mozilla sees itself I’m back to Canada after a two week visit to the Mozilla offices in Mountain View. The visit started with a presentation of Higgs and my PhD research work, which was made...
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A Simple JIT Compiler
In the last few days I’ve been prototyping a basic Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler for Higgs. I decided to start with a very simple design which is sometimes referred to as a tracelet JIT. This is simply a...
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Progress on the Higgs JIT
I’ve been busy working on various aspects of the new Higgs JIT compiler in the last month or so. Among other things, I decided to expand it into a proper tracing JIT compiler complete with support for...
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Presented at DConf 2013
Back in February, I visited Mozilla to present my research on dynamic language optimization and learn more about the architecture of the JIT compiler that powers Mozilla Firefox. The talk I gave at...
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Turing Drawings Followup
Late last night, I was surprised when a friend informed me that a fork of my Turing Drawings project had made its way to the front page of Hacker News. The fork by Darius Bacon includes new features...
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PSA: Caffeine is a Drug
Are you a coffee drinker? Even if you aren’t, you might have noticed that everywhere you go, there’s coffee or other forms of caffeine. At the office, at the corner store, in restaurants, on airplanes,...
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Inlining in Higgs
May 2013 might have been the most hectic month of my life: I presented at DConf, visited Mozilla in San Francisco, packed and moved into a new apartment, visited Toronto and finally went on a short...
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How I miss you, dear SSA
To recap, I recently succeeded in getting inlining to work in the Higgs JIT compiler. I went a little further and implemented some very basic logic to adjust the topmost stack frame. This allows...
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Programming without Text Files
When I was an undergrad, I remember losing marks on a programming assignment because the teacher didn’t like that my source code spanned more than 80 columns, which didn’t play nicely with his Emacs...
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On holistic programming languages.
Reblogged from Das Glasperlenspiel: My friend Maxime recently blogged about "Programming Without Text Files". I've always wanted to be one of those bloggy people, and being fairly lazy and uncreative...
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Sometimes a datum is just a datum
The Smalltalk and SELF programming languages are famous, among other things, for pushing forward the idea that “everything is an object”. That is, every value in the language behaves as if it were an...
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Higgs: Rise of the SSA JIT
Approximately 60 days ago, I decided to begin refactoring the Higgs compiler to use an SSA intermediate representation (IR) instead of one based on 3-address form. The work has taken around twice as...
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Down the Rabbit Hole that is Inlining
Inlining is one of the most profitable optimizations a compiler can do. It’s profitable because it eliminates call and return overhead, but also because it can expose new optimization opportunities...
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