Compact AST Representation

Compact AST Representation

• Reddit Thread: Representing ASTs as byte strings with with small integers rather than pointers
• sajson: Last week, I described a JSON parse tree data structure that, worst case, requires N words for N characters of JSON text. Single allocation JSON?
• paper on on totally recompiling the code to make it a linear pass.
• Compiling tree transforms to operate on packed representations at ECOOPLDI 2017
  • Conference Presentation on YouTube
  • This is much more ambitious, but also more limited. Not only are there no pointers, but the tree traversal is equivalent to a linear scan through memory. It compiles a custom programming language and rearranges the operations so this is true.
  • See limitations at the end of the paper.
• Good references in that papers:
  • The Lattner/Adve paper below
  • Cache-Conscious Data Structure Layout
  • Compact Normal Form in Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- reduces both space and garbage collection pressure.
• Ken Thompson's postfix encoding for regexes (no pointers) is mentioned here: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

Compressed Pointers

This is related: more general, but more complex.

• Reddit: Transparent Pointer Compression for Linked Data Structures by Lattner, Adve -- divide address in to 4 GiB pools so that internal pointers are 32-bit.
• Jai Demo: Relative Pointers
• Object-Relative Addressing: Compressed Pointers in 64-bit Java Virtual Machines
• Reddit: Idea for Tiny Relative Pointers. Using the LSB for external vs. internal might be a good idea. I also wanted a bit for const vs. non-const.
• Vertical object layout and compression for fixed heaps
  • Implemented in the Virgil Language by Ben Titzer
  • Vertical Object Layout basically means transposing objects and fields. Analogous to arrays of structs -> struct of arrays. Except the "array" is every instance of a given type on the heap.
• CppCon 2019: Steven Pigeon “Small is beautiful: Techniques to minimise memory footprint” -- a lot of C++ metaprogramming tricks with constexpr, etc. Goes to the extreme on size but says little about speed. No benchmarks and no concrete applications, just small pieces of C++.
• Why Sorbet Is Fast -- Fast static type checker for Ruby written in nice C++. 32-bit IDs for interned strings for fast comparison. GlobalState and Ref.

Reducing Garbage Collection Pressure

• Span, Slices, string_view, StringPiece, etc.

Old Oil Stuff

• Oil Blog Post: What is oheap?
  • Oheap V1 was a read-only format for transporting an ASDL tree across the Python/C++ boundary. Though it turned out there wasn't a single clean boundary in the shell's architecture.
• OHeap2 was a read-write format, for OVM2.
  • At first I used it to represent .pyc files (Python's CodeObject)
  • Meant to replace marshal, pickle, and zipimport.
  • 4-16-N model: 4 byte refs, 16 byte cells, and N byte slabs.
  • See ovm2/oheap2.py
  • OHeap2 might still be a good idea, but I judged OVM2 not to be a good idea