[graalvm-users] General application of Graal/Truffle outside of language implementation.

[Elias N Vasylenko]

Hi Gilles

Thank you for the thorough response. I'm looking forward to exploring
this further with some practical application.

I recall seeing benchmarks that show the Graal compiler is already very
good at optimising Java Streams, which is another example of something
like a "configurable computation". For the sake of argument, if GraalVM
shipped a custom implementation of the Stream API which internally
modelled operations as Truffle Nodes, might you expect to see
performance improve even further?

Also, what would the entry-point look like for Java code calling into a
programmatically-built Truffle AST? All the examples I can find are
geared towards implementing and embedding language runtimes, but
presumably we would hope to avoid the ceremony of the Polyglot API in
this case since there is no actual language, parser, etc.

On Tue, 2019-04-09 at 09:40 +0200, Gilles Duboscq wrote:
> Hi Eli,
> 
> Indeed, the pattern is more general than just programming language
> interpreter.
> You could also say that it's simply the concept of interpreter that
> goes beyond what is typically considered a programming language.
> 
> In general the question is:
> - Is the system applying some "configurable" computation?
> - Are some "configurations" repeatedly re-used in a performance
> critical part of the system?
> 
> If yes then you can use Truffle (or any form of partial evaluation)
> to create specialized versions of your configurable computation.
> In the case of a typical programming language interpreter, the
> "configuration" is the AST and the computation is the interpretation
> of an AST given some input/environment.
> Most programs repeatedly use the same ASTs to it's worth making
> specialized code to handle those ASTs.
> 
> I imagine a RxJava pipeline could also be considered such a
> "configuration".
> If the system encourages short-lived instances, if those instances
> often have the same "shape", that can also be exploited.
> 
> 
> Truffle also goes somehow beyond that by allowing you to take
> advantage of the following:
> - Are your computations usually contextually biased to particular
> cases?
> 
> If yes you can use truffle to profile these biases and exploit them
> to simplify/optimize your computations.
> In a programming language interpreter, these would typically be
> branch or type profiles.
> 
>   Gilles
> 
> On 08/04/2019 11:46, Elias N Vasylenko wrote:
> > Hello
> > 
> > So it strikes me that interpreters for programming languages are
> > not
> > the only place in which we abstract over logic with AST-like
> > structures
> > that might benefit from JIT compilation. Have other applications of
> > Graal/Truffle outside of language implementations been explored? Do
> > they even make sense?
> > 
> > Take for instance something like RxJava, where a pipeline of
> > operations
> > is built dynamically and then applied to a possibly-unbounded
> > series of
> > messages. Even the Java Stream API is a similar pattern, though
> > instances tend to be short-lived over discrete, relatively-small
> > data
> > sets so may not be good candidates. Could that kind of system
> > benefit
> > from internally representing/processing operations via a truffle-
> > based
> > AST/interpreter?
> > 
> > I hope this is a sensible question, I am only a casual observer.
> > 
> > Eli
> 
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