[erlang-questions] HiPE in OTP 22

[Dmytro Lytovchenko]

My existing VM source knowledge and low level programming competence are
probably close to the arcane knowledge required to make HiPE work.

Just registering my name on the waiting list, I am 100% busy at least until
the Code Beam STO, possibly also a few weeks after.
Sometimes I do get paid time to assist the OTP team with whatever task is
on the table, or HiPE might become a larger project, either my personal or
between my employer and Ericsson's OTP team. Who knows.

On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 at 14:43, Kenneth Lundin <kenneth@REDACTED> wrote:

> In OTP 22 HiPE (the native code generator) is not fully functional.
>
> The reasons for this are:
>
>    1. We have introduced new beam instructions which the HiPE native code
>    compiler does not handle.
>    2. The new optimizations in the beam compiler create new combinations
>    of instructions that HiPE does not handle correctly.
>    3. Until now HiPE has been developed by Kostis Sagonas and his
>    students at Uppsala University and Technial University of Athens. But now
>    other projects take up all of their resources.
>    4. The OTP team at Ericsson can't prioritize to address these issues
>    either since
>    - there is no use of HiPE among our primary customers
>       - the effort needed to gainthe competence to addess the problems
>       above is quite high.
>
> In OTP 22 we have therefore decided to do a workaround for HiPE (native
> code gen) in such a way that invokations of `erlc +native erlfile.erl` or
> `erlc +native erlfile.beam` will automatically fall back to producing a
> .beam file without native code if any of the new binary matching
> instructions are used. A warning will also be produced when this happens.
>
> The new beam instructions are used for binary matching so it is mostly (or
> only) modules containing binary matching expressions which will fail the
> native code generation. Notably is that the native code generations that
> Dialyzer does on the fly will still work since the modules chosen do not
> contain binary matching. Native code generation of Dialyzer makes the
> analysis about 40% faster.
>
> Building OTP with the configure option `--enable-native-libs` will still
> work in OTP 22 but a note about potential instability when running native
> code will be output, since we have noticed issues in our test when running
> these builds.
>
> We have no idea about who are using HiPE and for what, but in order to
> keep HiPE in shape and as part of the OTP releases we need help in
> maintaining it.
> Volunteers  are welcome
>
> /Kenneth, Erlang/OTP Ericsson
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