Re: [ANN] Ravi 1.0 Beta5 release

Hey man! Good to know ravi is getting really warm in the oven! Regarding the changes to regular lua, I've got some questions:

I see it introduces some types. Most notably, to me, would be integer and number. Why not integer and float?
Another question: if integer and number are initialized with 0, why not initialize arrays too? Or even dictionaries?
Ravi arrays seem to add a bit of complexity to the language, making it a bit harder to parse a lua program to ravi with all the optional optimizations. How much of a performance boost arrays add to an overall program compared to regular (ravi optimized) tables?
Ravi seems to remove nil from the spotlight a bit, it seems, with exception to string, closure and user-defined types. This could also be a concern when migrating projects to ravi. Not sure if a big concern but for sure something to keep in mind. Would there be plans to go further, like changing the regular table's behavior regarding setting a key to nil and adding a new method to tables? Or even back down? What do you think is the purpose of nil in a fully ravi optimized program?
Any chance fixed size array declaration would be in the queue for us humble folks? (aka: local array: integer[4] = {2, 3, 4, 5})
Given arrays are a thing for ravi, how does immutability sound in your book? Quite an interesting feature with arrays. We can already do it using standard lua kung fu, but just checking how it sounds to the ears.
How "local by default" variables sound to you?

Some of these questions really leap away from Lua but, curiosity usually bests me on january (and subsequent months). Cheers!

Em seg., 4 de jan. de 2021 às 23:39, Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@majumdar.org.uk> escreveu:

On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 at 20:31, Russell Haley <russ.haley@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The difference in SLOC between LLVM and MIR is hilarious: 4.13 Million LOC vs 16,000. How big is the base Ravi install?
>

Indeed. It takes seconds to build Ravi with MIR - it used to take
several minutes to build LLVM. Also resulting binaries are small.

MIR is an unbelievable project. All small JIT backends I tried before
were very bad at optimization. MIR manages to get close to 2x gcc or
clang even with its small size and thus less features. I guess it
helps that the developer of MIR is the maintainer of gcc register
allocation.

> Have you done any benchmarking between Ravi (MIR) and LuaJIT?

No, but LuaJIT will always win in the general case, as Ravi needs type
annotations for good performance. Until I can implement function
specializations with predicted types, it will be hard to beat LuaJIT.

>
> Is it possible to just swap in Ravi where one would use Lua or are there caveats? For instance, can I run standard lua scripts and lua rocks without static types?
>

Yes but there are some caveats. I guess if you are running standard
Lua code, there is not much benefit.

Regards

"A arrogância é a arma dos fracos."

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