Hi,
On Apr 7, 2010, at 3:19 PM, Daniel Spiewak wrote:
Actually, according to Charles Nutter, this probably isn't the best
idea.
Apparently AOT compilation is mostly just good for obfuscation, it
doesn't
improve performance much (if at all). In fact, it actually hurts
startup
performance because there's more bytecode to verify. So, let's not
go down
that road... :-)
Instead of AOT compilation, what we could look into is bundler (
http://github.com/carlhuda/bundler). This will allow us to create a
static
bundle which directly references all of the gems we need without
actually
loading rubygems. This would be hugely advantageous in terms of
startup
performance, and could bring us to within spitting distance of
Buildr on
MRI.
Loading rubygems is what makes buildr on JRuby slow? I thought it was
JVM startup time.
Unfortunately, it would also mean that gem dependencies and Buildr
plugins packaged as gems would not work with the all-in-one
distribution.
Is this a worthwhile tradeoff? I imagine most people who would go
for the
all-in-one are not going to be interested in gem-based dependencies
for
precisely the same reasons.
I disagree with this. At least some of people who want to use the all-
in-one will be people who have acquired a bunch of source code that
says "you need buildr to build this." If the all-in-one doesn't allow
extensions, then the people who provide said source code will have to
say "you need buildr to build this, but not the one that's easy to
install. Sorry."
Buildr's whole architecture is oriented around its smooth
extensibility. That seems like something to promote, not something to
reserve for the elite who don't choose the easiest install path.
Rhett
Daniel
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Antoine Toulme <[email protected]
>wrote:
This would represent a huge performance gain for Buildr! Thanks for
putting
it together.
Antoine
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 11:23, Daniel Spiewak <[email protected]>
wrote:
http://paste.pocoo.org/show/198856/
This is a patch to run the JRuby ahead-of-time compiler against the
*entire*Ruby distribution and installed gems prior to zipping for
distribution. The
motivations behind this are two-fold. First, the resulting .class
files
are
substantially smaller than the original .rb files and so the size
of the
distributable goes down. More importantly though, AOT compilation
imparts
a
significant performance advantage, particularly when we can apply
some
optimizations. Unfortunately, documentation seems to be limited
(read:
non-existant) where it comes to tuning the AOT compiler, so I had
to just
guess based on what I know of its architecture. The settings I am
using
are
the same ones I've been using with the regular JRuby JIT running
Buildr
for
more than six months, so I think they're fairly safe (and they do
yield
substantial benefits).
The big problem I'm having is that the compiler always seems to
return an
error. It does compile everything (except for our buildr/java/
bdd.rb and
one of Hoe's files, which cause internal exceptions), and it doesn't
print
any errors, but regardless of what I do, the result always seems
to be an
error code of 1. Headius, if you're listening in lurk mode, we
could use
some help here. :-)
Hopefully this change will help streamline our all-in-one
distribution
and
maybe make it a compelling option even for those who are
comfortable with
`gem install`.
Daniel
