On 06/10/2012 09:34 AM, Robert Bradshaw wrote:
On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 12:14 AM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
<d.s.seljeb...@astro.uio.no>  wrote:


Robert Bradshaw<rober...@gmail.com>  wrote:

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 10:45 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
<d.s.seljeb...@astro.uio.no>  wrote:
I'd love to not do interning, but I see no way around it.

No, I want to use the lower 64 bits by default, but always have the
top 96 bits around to allow using this mechanism in "secure" mode at a
slight penalty. md5 is out because there are known collisions. (Yes,
sha-1 may succumb sooner rather than later, theoretical weaknesses
have been shown, so we could look to using something else (hopefully
still shipped with Python).

But very few users are going to know about this. What's the odds that the user 
who decide to trigger JIT-compilation with function signatures that varies 
based on the input will know about the option and turn it on and also recompile 
all his/her C extension modules?

In practice, such an option would always stay at its default value. If we leave 
it to secure by default and start teaching it to users from the start...but 
that's a big price to pay.

Yes, it's not ideal from this perspective.

And if you *do* want to run in secure mode, it will be a lot slower than 
interning.

Are you thinking that the 64-bit interned pointer would be used as the
hash? In this case all hashtables would have to be constructed at
runtime, which means it needs to be really, really cheap (well under a
milisecond, I'm sure Sage has>1000 classes,>10000 methods it imports
at startup). Also I'm not sure how the very-uneven distribution would
play out for constructing perfect hastables (perhaps it won't hurt,
there's likely to be long runs of consecutive values in some cases.

No, I'm thinking that callsites need both the 64-bit interned char* and the 64-bit hash of the *contents*. They use the hash to figure out the position, then compare by ID.

The hash is not stored in callees, it's discarded after figuring out the table layout.

(There was this idea that if the char* has least significant bit set, we'd hash it directly rather than dereference it, but let's ignore that for now.)

I don't think under a millisecond is unfeasible to hash smallish tables -- we could put the pointer through a cheap hash to create more entropy (for the perfect hashing, being able to select a hash function through the >>r is important, so you can't just use the pointer directly -- but there are functions cheaper than md5, e.g, in here: http://code.google.com/p/ulib/)

That would save us a register and make the instructions shorter in some places I guess...I think it's really miniscule, it's not like the effect of load of a global variable. But if you like this approach I can benchmark C-written hashtable creation and see.

Dag
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