On Feb 1, 2010, at 8:59 AM, Rodrigo Kumpera wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Jonathan Shore <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> You are entirely right. I like other quants in finance, use R for a lot of
> my work, but Java for performance (used to be C++). My preference is to use
> a functional language at the level where I use Java. The only practical
> choices at this point are Scala (not a big fan) or F#. There are other
> implementations for FP such as INRIA's Ocaml, and Jaskell (but much too
> slow), Clojure (again too slow), etc ...
>
> I've also been back-reading on the LLVM vs mono code-generation debate. At
> this point the main concern stated in not moving over to LLVM completely is
> the slower JIT'ing in LLVM. Surely there are different levels of JIT
> optimisations that can be turned on or off within LLVM?
>
> LLVM is significantly slower than mono's JIT even if we no optimizations are
> done and the fast inssel backend is used.
Sorry to hear that. I wonder whether it is inefficient data-structures
and/or are they putting the tree through more phases of analysis before it gets
to code generation ...
>
>
> At this point LLVM has matured and gained enough momentum that one would
> suspect that it is more "expensive" for mono development to enhance its own
> code generation than adopt LLVM. I raise this issue as there are a number
> of things that LLVM does quite a bit better. The effort focused on in-house
> code generation could be focused on a better more complete LLVM /
> LLVM-mapping. Just speaking as a 3rd party looking-in ...
>
>
>
> Today it's not possible to completely switch to LLVM since, for example, it
> runs on less archs than mono does and a binary with LLVM enabled is 3 times
> bigger. And I'm not sure if it's even desirable to completely switch, it's
> something that we'll eventually figure out once our LLVM backend gets more
> mature.
>
I recognize that you are targeting mono for embedded devices (i.e. iphone/ipad,
etc), so want to control the footprint. For the niche that represents
science, finance, however, we "selfishly" are most interested in performance ;)
So am looking forward to strides in this area with mono.
regards
Jonathan
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