HiPE to be removed in OTP 24?

[Felix Gallo]

Given the highly constrained resources of the OTP team, I would generally
expect them to go the other way, and try to hitch their wagons to large
systems being built or maintained by others.  The cost of building a de
novo high performing JIT and then committing to its ongoing maintenance and
development doesn't look, from the outside, like the kind of investment
that the OTP team has traditionally made.  Even relatively fundamental
subsystems tend to age out for lack of curation.  Is there a new source of
funding or staffing which gives the team confidence that they'll be able to
make that commitment?

To ROK's point more specifically -- many new architectures are emerging
these days and it's not clear that x86 is the long term winner -- various
flavors of ARM, at a minimum, look to be contenders in the near future, at
both the consumer and industrial levels.  Clang + co are clearly going to
keep getting optimizers and JITs for those environments through the work of
thousands of well-incentivized contributors.  What does the BEAMJIT vector
look like by comparison?

F.

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 3:42 PM Tristan Sloughter <t@REDACTED> wrote:

> The JIT will support tracing like normal. So even if it was on-par or even
> a little slower than HiPE I think that is reason enough alone to switch --
> and reason enough to have been attempting at alternatives all these years.
>
> JIT could be a solution that makes sense in general usage while HIPE
> because of its limitations (even before recent OTP changes that diverged
> from HIPE even more so) meant it was a niche tool. Very useful to those
> problems it fit, but still niche.
>
> Tristan
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2020, at 10:45, Grzegorz Junka wrote:
>
> Hi Kenneth,
>
> Thanks to Richard's link I was able to see the presentation about JIT and
> it looks like the team was putting a lot of effort since as early as 2012
> into JIT. But on none of the benchmarks JIT was actually better than HiPE.
>
> I am interested, in what way JIT is better than HiPE that it's worth
> putting the effort into developing something new instead of fixing HiPE?
>
> Regards
>
> Grzegorz
>
>
> On 18/06/2020 08:35, Kenneth Lundin wrote:
>
>
> HiPE is the runtime and compiler support for native code generation of
> Erlang modules that some of you might have tried, it is part of the OTP
> repository today.
>
> The OTP team is planning to remove HiPE in the OTP 24 release for the
> following reasons:
>
>    - we plan to introduce a new way of executing Erlang, the "JIT"
>    described by Lukas Larsson at Code Beam V
>    - since OTP 22, HiPE is not fully functional (does not handle all beam
>    instructions and combinations)
>    - there is no use of HiPE among our primary customers. We actually
>    don't know where HiPE is used except for speeding up Dialyzer which we have
>    another solution for.
>    - The current support for HiPE in the code is a blocker or creates
>    extra work in our new development.
>
> In order to not remove HiPE in OTP 24, we really soon need maintainers
> committing (long term) to keep HiPE in shape and up to date with the rest
> of OTP.
> /Kenneth Erlang/OTP, Ericsson
>
>
>
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