Switching projects

Project Progress: PERL5 PCRE / Stack-less Just in time compiler

This is an update about my project progress in SPO600, I have switched projects and made some steps forward.

Perl5

In my previous post I ruled out some areas in Perl5 and was heading towards the regular expression engine as an area to optimize. Well I got a response from the mailing list saying the regular expression engine should be fine and does not really need any simple optimizations. I was kind of stubborn in thinking I could find something in perl and I kept looking when nothing obvious was there. In hindsight I should have stopped and tried out different packages sooner.

PCRE and sljit

After a suggestion from my professor I have looked at PCRE(Perl compatible regular expressions) This small library deals with parsing regular expressions using similar semantics as perl. I downloaded the source via subversion

svn co svn://vcs.exim.org/pcre2/code/trunk pcre

and found a folder in the source called sljit. There are many files in that directory with architecture specific code. They have some for x86, some for ARM, some for Sparc and more, this peaked my interest so I looked into it. I found that sljit is a stack-less just in time compiler which is cpu independent, more info here. Specifically in pcre it is part of a pcre performance project which uses sljit to improve the pattern matching speed of pcre.

Moving forward

I have just found all this recently, so for now I will be looking into any functions that can be ported over to another architecture or any areas that look promising for optimization. I hope to soon zero in on one particular location, and actually get something done.

Thanks for reading