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by fniephaus 2135 days ago
> Is there an overview somewhere which allows comparison with fig. 4 of your ACM 2019 publication?

We have set up a benchmarking infrastructure for performance tracking, but it is unfortunately not public (yet). Also, we have switched from GraalVM EE/JDK8 to GraalVM CE/JDK11 a couple of months ago, which makes it hard to compare recent with older results. But what I can say it that performance on GraalVM CE/JDK11 is currently better than on GraalVM EE/JDK8 a year ago. I expect it to be faster on EE as well, but I'd need to measure by how much.

> Anyway in that publication SOMns using the same technology - as far as I understand - showed a completely different performance pattern; does this still apply, and what is/was the reason for this?

Correct. First, SOMns does not support a real Smalltalk system and does not support some crucial mechanisms (e.g. changing the class of an object). So TruffleSqueak must check the class of an object in quite some cases, which is a slight, unavoidable overhead. More importantly, SOMns has some primitives that Squeak does not, for example for comparing strings. That's for example another reason why SOMns is so much faster in the JSON benchmark. For your curiosity, here's a screenshot of the benchmark results for a current TruffleSqueak and SOMns (note that they ran on different versions of GraalVM, I think you can somewhat compare the TruffleSqueak numbers to "GraalSqueak-CE" in fig. 4 of the paper):

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2368856/90402527-d...

1 comments

Interesting, thanks. Still surprising it is a factor of two.