Rhys Weatherley has taken a month’s sabbatical from pnet and during this time he created a new project under the DotGNU umbrella, libjit. This library implements Just-In-Time compilation functionality. Unlike other
JIT’s, this one is designed to be independent of any particular virtual machine bytecode format or language.The hope is that Free Software projects can get a leg-up on proprietary VM vendors by using this library
rather than spending large amounts of time writing their own JIT from
scratch.
This JIT is also designed to be portable to multiple architectures. If you
run libjit on a machine for which a native code generator is not yet
available, then libjit will fall back to interpreting the code. This way,
you don’t need to write your own interpreter for your bytecode format if
you don’t want to.
libjit is independent of pnet (that’s one of the main points!) but we’ll
eventually modify pnet to use it for JIT’ing.
In the newly released version 0.0.0f, tutorials 1 to 4 now work correctly
using the interpreted back end, which should allow people to experiment with
real examples now. The x86 and ARM native code generator back-ends should
follow in the next few days.
Up-to-date news, and download links:
http://www.southern-storm.com.au/libjit.html
libjit development discussions mailing list:
http://dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libjit-developers
It’s at version 0.0.0f. I love the long list of features it *will* have. It’s basically nothing right now.
Can’t say the man doesn’t have aspiring ideals.
Although, you know, I hope this makes P.Net as fast/er in comparison to Mono, ‘cuz, choice is good.
Fight it out to the death, man, and let the best tech win.
No, seriously. Mono is much further along, and it isn’t written mostly in C. I mean, What a braindead idea that was. The Free Software Foundation and it’s supporters are easilly the most confrontational and divisive force in the free software world.
No, seriously. Mono is much further along, and it isn’t written mostly in C. I mean, What a braindead idea that was. The Free Software Foundation and it’s supporters are easilly the most confrontational and divisive force in the free software world.
I guess you’d have me believe that Mono wrote their JIT in C# ? . That they don’t like C (when instead of doing a decent Winforms implementation in C# like DotGNU’s doing, they have wrapped it over Wine ?). That Mono don’t use PInvoke into good old “brain dead” C code all around their wrappers (start from Gtk# and count down).
Mono looks further along because they have Novell paying out $$$ to Miguel to jet around and give talks about how good Mono is and how it’s not going to bring Gnome under MS patents
> It’s at version 0.0.0f. I love the long list of features it
> *will* have. It’s basically nothing right now.
Hey, I’m working on function inlining and I can see a lot of things that are already working very nicely.
Also the aim of this is not to beat Mono – but to prevent future VMs from falling into the Kaffe/Mono trap of having to rebuild a JIT from scratch whenever a slightly different Bytecode comes up.
Btw, “beating mono” was never on the agenda… DotGNU was always after the bigger fish in the game.
It’s independent of bytecode , garbage collector and processor … GNU lightning doesn’t even come close on the feature set. This is a great tool to feed 3 address codes and get x86 code out (though *shudder* IA-46 shows that the JIT is slower than the interpreted version due to gcc’s parallelization being much better).
What it should become is the gcc of JITs … with a backend for any and every processor.
Mono looks further along because they have Novell paying out $$$ to Miguel
Mono was further along than DotGNU before Novell got involved.
“Mono looks further along because they have Novell paying out $$$ to Miguel to jet around and give talks about how good Mono is and how it’s not going to bring Gnome under MS patents.”
Mono is further along. I hate to say it, but, you know, its got a wider breadth of core assemblies done, its faster, stronger, harder, better – oh, excuse me, I think I almost rocked out to some Daft Punk there.
Of course, when someone is dropping dollar bills into your wallet to make some software work, things tend to become very cohesive in a short amount of time.
The only thing, I think, they need in the face of DotGNU is some portability and an “easier” S.W.F implementation. I would really like to see some serious competition – competition, you know, not crappy name-calling like twelve-year olds on the merry-go-round, serious competition between the two of them, to get some serious innovation rolling.
It’s at version 0.0.0f. I love the long list of features it *will* have. It’s basically nothing right now.
A lot of stuff (here) gets announced before it is even there. Including alpha’s, beta’s, designs. Perhaps they’re seeking feedback, developers, beta testers, translators, or other kind of help. Perhaps they want to be in the news too, since Mono does so as well. Who knows… apparantly, the writer did have a reason to write about it here, else s/he wouldn’t have done so