compiler optimization

Chris Lattner's ASPLOS 2021 keynote on the golden age of compiler design in an era of hardware and software co-design, covering compiler infrastructure for accelerators and unifying hardware IRs.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2023 talk on modernizing compiler design for the Carbon toolchain, using data-oriented design and modern hardware assumptions. It covers lexing, parsing and compact data structures aimed at compiler performance.

Modern Vintage Gamer examines the claim from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project that the game shipped unoptimized, and puts it in the context of 1996 N64 development.

Brandt Bucher presents his prototype JIT compiler for CPython at the 2023 Core Developer Sprint. He explains the copy-and-patch approach, the implementation and its performance.

Andrew Kelley's roadmap talk on upcoming Zig compiler milestones, focused on compilation speed. It was given at a Zig community event in 2022.

Andreas Kling live-codes a prototype JavaScript JIT compiler for the LibJS engine used in SerenityOS and Ladybird. He builds a standalone bytecode VM, a simple interpreter, and then a simple JIT in about 80 minutes.

Anders Hejlsberg introduces the native port of the TypeScript compiler, written in Go, which promises roughly 10x faster tooling. He demos compiling VS Code and explains where the speedup comes from.

An interview with Anders Hejlsberg, lead architect of TypeScript, about porting the TypeScript compiler to Go. He covers the 10x type-checking speedup, lower memory use, and why Go was chosen.

A React Conf talk by Xuan Huang previewing React Forget, a compiler that automatically memoizes components. It argues for making memoization the default so developers need not write useMemo or useCallback by hand.

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

Richard Feldman explains how pure functional languages can match or beat imperative ones on performance. Compilers can turn immutable code into in-place mutation, avoiding naive copying. The talk draws on his work on the Roc language.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

A talk by Yuri Iozzelli at a WebAssembly meetup on CheerpX, an x86 virtual machine running in the browser. It uses a JIT compiler that emits WebAssembly at runtime to run real native applications. It covers the architecture and demos such as porting a multiplayer C++ game.

Lex Fridman's long interview with Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM and Swift, covering the future of computing and programming languages. It touches on compilers, hardware, and his work at Apple, Tesla, Google and SiFive.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin's EuroBSDcon 2022 talk quantifies the older FreeBSD optimizations that let Netflix serve web traffic at 800Gb/s, including TSO, LRO, VM page cache zones, asynchronous sendfile and unmapped mbufs.

Lex Fridman's long podcast conversation with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, LLVM and MLIR and co-founder of Modular. Topics include the Mojo language, the future of programming and AI, and hardware.

A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.

Andrew Kelley's 2024 Zig roadmap talk, followed by a Q&A, covers the language's priorities and the state of the project. Topics include compilation speed, moving off LLVM toward a self-hosted toolchain, async, and the path to 1.0.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, presents practical data-oriented design techniques for shrinking memory footprint and making programs cache friendly. He ends with a case study of how these ideas sped up the Zig compiler.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

Kaze Emanuar searches for the best sine approximation for the Nintendo 64, comparing the lookup tables in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time with polynomial alternatives. It walks through numerics and 3rd, 4th and 5th order approximations.

Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster. He walks through the techniques contributors used.

A long George Hotz live-stream from June 2023 in which he works on tinygrad and rants about AMD's drivers, ultimately declaring he is giving up on AMD. It also touches on hardware and compiler topics.

Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.

Daniel Lemire's QCon talk on how simdjson parses gigabytes of JSON per second. It covers SIMD vectorization, branch prediction and the lessons learned building a fast parser.

In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.

Developer Voices interviews Chris Lattner about Mojo, a Python-compatible language aimed at CPU/GPU performance built on LLVM and MLIR. It covers performance features, the type system and why Mojo uses Python syntax.

An Apple WWDC24 session introducing Embedded Swift, a subset of Swift with no runtime that targets tiny microcontrollers. It demonstrates the idea on an off-the-shelf Matter smart home device.

ThePrimeagen interviews Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang, Swift and Mojo, with TJ DeVries, in a long live-streamed conversation. They discuss language design and Lattner's experience building Swift.

In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Casey Muratori shows how typical 'clean code' object-oriented patterns can cost large factors in performance. He benchmarks them against simpler data-oriented code.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.

A long Machine Learning Street Talk interview with Kenneth Stanley, creator of NEAT and novelty search, about his book on why greatness cannot be planned. They discuss open-endedness, the tyranny of objectives, serendipity and the evolution of ideas.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

Folding Ideas' long essay on why playing poorly in World of Warcraft feels rude. It traces how raiding culture shifted from relaxed fun to optimization, theorycrafting and wikis.

A Noclip Greatest Hits documentary on the legacy of RollerCoaster Tycoon, covering its original design, Chris Sawyer and the OpenRCT2 community that keeps it alive.

Marshall Kirk McKusick gives a talk at EuroBSDCon tracing filesystem and storage development from 1979 to today, using the BSD Fast Filesystem as the focus. It covers early disk-geometry optimization through later contiguous layout and small-file performance work.