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Over a Thousand Years Ago...

Recently, our archeologists at the Pheonix Foundation discovered the remains of an ancient religious text among the ruins of the long lost civilization of program builders. It has long been assumed that the ancient program builders did their computations laborously by hand, however fresh from digging through RMS's closet, the archeologists have discovered evidence to the contrary. The yellowed scroll describes a means by which to hand-translate UM code into social memes. This allowed the program builders to run code natively on their collective social consciences.

The UM

Before:

guest:~/dev/paul_um guest$ time ./vm sandmark.umz 
trying to Allocate array of size 0..
---- snip ----
free after loadprog..
success.
loadprog ok.
 == SANDmark 19106 beginning stress test / benchmark.. ==
 100. 12345678.09abcdef
---- snip ----
 0.   a8d1619e.5540e6cf
 SANDmark complete.


 real    2m3.995s
 user    2m1.253s
 sys     0m0.636s

After:

guest:~/dev/paul_um guest$ time ./vm --compile sandmark.umz 
trying to Allocate array of size 0..
---- snip ----
loadprog ok.
 == SANDmark 19106 beginning stress test / benchmark.. ==
 100. 12345678.09abcdef
---- snip ----
 0.   a8d1619e.5540e6cf
 SANDmark complete.

 real    1m0.758s
 user    0m59.292s
 sys     0m0.478s

Download: paul_um.tar.gz

Known to work on:

• MacOS X
• Linux
• Windows XP/Cygwin

Differences between interpreted and compiled code may vary. The runs above shows an improvement of 50%. On a similar computer with a better malloc/free allocator, the improvement was 66%. On a Windows XP box under Cygwin with a 3 GHz Pentium IV, both interpreted and compiled mode was slower than either of the above computers and only gained a 40% speed up through compiling.

Open question: What variables are influencing SANDmark performance?

Inner Gears

A big thanks to Mike Pall for creating Dynasm, the framework that helped quickly construct the code generator in two days. It is quality work.

To Do...

1. The readline input routine is not perfect in some corner cases. This needs to be fixed.
2. At the moment, only small UMCs such as sandmark run under the VM in compiled mode due to the prohibitive cost of maintaining link information for larger executables. I have sucessfully reengineered the Dynasm linker to work without needing a large in-memory data structure proportional with the program size, however I have not yet been able to actually remove the code that makes the large data structures in the first place. I should have that done soon, lifting this limitation.