| 1 |
NAME |
| 2 |
Faster - do some things faster |
| 3 |
|
| 4 |
SYNOPSIS |
| 5 |
use Faster; |
| 6 |
|
| 7 |
perl -MFaster ... |
| 8 |
|
| 9 |
DESCRIPTION |
| 10 |
This module implements a very simple-minded JIT. It works by more or |
| 11 |
less translating every function it sees into a C program, compiling it |
| 12 |
and then replacing the function by the compiled code. |
| 13 |
|
| 14 |
As a result, startup times are immense, as every function might lead to |
| 15 |
a full-blown compilation. |
| 16 |
|
| 17 |
The speed improvements are also not great, you can expect 20% or so on |
| 18 |
average, for code that runs very often. |
| 19 |
|
| 20 |
Faster is in the early stages of development. Due to its design its |
| 21 |
relatively safe to use (it will either work or simply slowdown the |
| 22 |
program immensely, but rarely cause bugs). |
| 23 |
|
| 24 |
Usage is very easy, just "use Faster" and every function called from |
| 25 |
then on will be compiled. |
| 26 |
|
| 27 |
Right now, Faster will leave ltos of *.c, *.o and *.so files in /tmp, |
| 28 |
and it will even create those temporary files in an insecure manner, so |
| 29 |
watch out. |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
BUGS/LIMITATIONS |
| 32 |
Perl will check much less often for asynchronous signals in |
| 33 |
Faster-compiled code. It tries to check on every function call, loop |
| 34 |
iteration and every I/O operator, though. |
| 35 |
|
| 36 |
The following things will disable Faster. If you manage to enable them |
| 37 |
at runtime, bad things will happen. |
| 38 |
|
| 39 |
enabled tainting |
| 40 |
enabled debugging |
| 41 |
|
| 42 |
This will dramatically reduce Faster's performance: |
| 43 |
|
| 44 |
threads (but you don't care about speed if you use threads anyway) |
| 45 |
|
| 46 |
These constructs will force the use of the interpreter as soon as they |
| 47 |
are being executed, for the rest of the currently executed: |
| 48 |
|
| 49 |
.., ... (flipflop operators) |
| 50 |
goto |
| 51 |
next, redo (but not well-behaved last's) |
| 52 |
eval |
| 53 |
require |
| 54 |
any use of formats |
| 55 |
|
| 56 |
AUTHOR |
| 57 |
Marc Lehmann <schmorp@schmorp.de> |
| 58 |
http://home.schmorp.de/ |
| 59 |
|
