Unladen Swallow 2009Q2

http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/Release2009Q2

 

Unladen Swallow 2009Q2

 

Unladen Swallow 2009Q2 is the first release of Unladen Swallow to use  LLVM for native code generation. To obtain the 2009Q2 release, run

svn checkout http://unladen-swallow.googlecode.com/svn/branches/release-2009Q2-maint unladen-2009Q2

The Unladen Swallow team does not recommend wide adoption of the 2009Q2 release. This is intended as a checkpoint of our progress, a milestone on the long path to our eventual performance goals. 2009Q2 can compile all pure-Python code to correct native machine code, but is intended to set the stage for more significant performance improvements in the 2009Q3 release that will take advantage of the LLVM-based compiler infrastructure built in Q2.

Highlights:

• Unladen Swallow 2009Q2 uses LLVM to compile hot functions (anything called more than 10000 times) to machine code. A -j always command-line option is available to force all functions though LLVM.
• Unladen Swallow 2009Q2 starts up faster than 2009Q1.
• A number of buggy corner cases in the 2009Q1 version of cPickle have been fixed.
• Unladen Swallow 2009Q2 passes the tests for all the third-party tools and libraries listed on the Testing page. Significantly for many projects, this includes compatibility with Twisted, Django, NumPy and Swig.

 

Lowlights:

• Memory usage has increased by 10x. We have thus far spent no time improving this; lowering memory usage is a goal for the 2009Q3 release.
• LLVM's JIT memory manager is limited to 16MB of native code. This is not a problem in practice, but interferes with regrtest.py runs. This is being fixed upstream in LLVM, and the result patch will be backported to the 2009Q2 release branch.