Update

It’s been a while since I wrote anything on the blog! A lot has been going on in the meantime, both in Rust, parallel JavaScript, and personally…I hate to write a big update post but I gotta’ catch up somehow!

Rust

First, we made our 0.1 release, which is great. We are now planning for 0.2. The goal is to make frequent, relatively regular releases. We’re still in such an early phase that it doesn’t seem to make sense to literally release every few months, but at the same time we don’t plan to wait long.

Lately I’ve been working on several issues, some major, some minor. The most exciting to me has been #1493, which vastly improved our performance when working with thread-local boxes. There is still work to be done on box performance, but before taking any next steps more investigation is needed. The problems may be creating type descriptors, they may be garbage collection, etc. This is also a first step to simplifying some of the scarier parts of the Rust runtime.

On a smaller note, I’ve been working on a new iteration library that I’m reasonably excited about, based on the principles from an earlier blog post. Making it nice to use will require a lighter bind syntax, which I’ve almost got complete now. This also (as a side effect) improves our type inference somewhat. One final thing I’d like to do is integrate support for break and cont into the library, though some details remain to be discussed there.

Finally, I’m beginning work now on cross-crate inlining. I plan to write a post later exploring some of the dynamics of this. It’s an interesting problem. It’s clearly important for performance, though: functions like vec::iter() are used ubiquitously and we need to be able to inline their definitions. This is also where Rust’s emphasis on static dispatch can really pay off (not that it is not helpful already at reducing dispatch costs).

Parallel JavaScript

I have been progressing on the parallelism work that occupied the last few posts. First, the parallel JavaScript work now has an official name: the PJs project. That github project is not that useful at the moment, though: I am in the process of moving the code from an older GitHub project into the new one which contains the rest of mozilla-central.

What exists today is a (very) simple multi-threaded infrastructure that will run JavaScript functions in parallel, multiplexing them over a fixed number of workers. Right now though there is no data sharing between threads. I am working on the membrane approach.

I have also had some discussions with the Rivertrail group. The Rivertrail definition of an elemental function dovetails very well with my own ideas, so it seems like the two projects could be fruitfully combined: the PJs API can be used both for task-based parallel tasks and for those instances where vectorization either fails or is not effective.

Finally, I drew up a Java-based prototype of the API as well as the static type system that I described earlier. Having this prototype gives me confidence that the approach will work, as I found it quite easy to parallelize a number of interesting examples.

Whew!

Man, I didn’t realize how much stuff has been going on. No wonder I haven’t had time for blog posts! And this isn’t even a complete list, really. But it’s everything that’s interesting, I suppose.