Hi everyone!

For the past week or so I've been working on making typed arrays faster, use 
less memory, and GC better.  It involves moving typed arrays entirely into JSC, 
and rewriting them so that they benefit from JSC object model optimizations.

Link: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119064

The short story is, if you're not on the Mac port, then I'll try to do my best 
to make things work but I'm probably going to make some mistakes.  I'm probably 
about 48 hours away from landing this and I'll try to make myself available to 
fix any fall-out.  The things I'm most likely to get wrong are: ensuring that 
the various code generators work on all build systems; ensuring that the 
~20-some files I've added and the ~20-sime files I've deleted, are actually 
added/deleted correctly on all builds; and making sure that some of the crazy 
template hacks that I've used work on all compilers.

Why this is all worth it:

It makes typed arrays faster: you can now allocate typed arrays up to 8x faster 
if they're small, and up to 6x faster if they're big.  Neutering no longer 
requires walking all worlds. Wrapping and unwrapping an array buffer no longer 
requires hash look-ups for the normal world.  And some other stuff, too.

It makes typed arrays use less memory: previously a typed array could use as 
many as 7 objects for each allocation; at best you'd get 5 (JS array buffer 
view wrapper, native array buffer view wrapper, weak handle to link the two, 
native array buffer, native array buffer contents).  Now, it takes just 2 
objects in the common case (JS array buffer view and a copy-space backing 
store) and 3 in the case of large ones (JS array buffer view, weak handle for a 
finalizer, and a malloc'd backing store).  You'll still get all of the crazy 
objects - at most 6 of them - if you use the full power of typed array APIs.  
With all of this in place, a typed array carries only 32 bytes of overhead on 
64-bit systems and 20 bytes of overhead on 32-bit systems.  It was *a lot* more 
than that before.

It makes typed arrays manage memory properly: previously the GC didn't know 
that typed arrays use memory.  So, although the GC could free the memory that 
typed arrays used, it wouldn't kick in properly in some cases.  See 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119049 and 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114824.  This patch fixes these issues 
comprehensively.

It makes the code more hackable: previously any attempt to optimize any typed 
array hack required grappling with binding code generation, layering violations 
that exposed the typed arrays to JSC JITs despite not being defined in JSC, and 
a grab-back of helper code that the bindings magically invoked.  There was a 
lot of duplicated code to deal with the various types of typed arrays.  Now, 
typed arrays are all templatized; you usually only write a piece of code once 
thanks to the wonders of template polymorphism.

This also fixes a bunch of semantics issues, with how typed array fields work 
in JS and when/where exceptions ought to be thrown.  In this regard, I'm 
basically attempting to match Firefox behavior since that's where the standards 
appear to be going.

I hope that I get all of this to work on all platforms on the first try.  If I 
don't, I apologize in advance, and I'll try to be around to help the fall-out.

-Filip
_______________________________________________
webkit-dev mailing list
webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org
https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev

Reply via email to