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- Follow-up on CS Pro ModNovember 30 2008
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More than a year ago I predicted that CS Pro Mod would die. The outcome? Here’s a snapshot of our HL2 server statistics:
That’s 0.03% of server market share. Whoops.
The death of CGS was the major outlet for competitive CS:S. One has to wonder whether this occurrence is good or bad for Source. The fact that the newest league launched exclusively against CS 1.6 might be pretty telling.
I am not active in the professional gaming scene anymore, so I can talk frankly. The idea of CGS felt odd to me when it first launched. Computer/console games not a real sport in any athletic sense. Why would anyone want to watch other people play games over TV, when spectator modes and playing the games themselves are so easy (and fun) to do with minimal effort?
Perhaps television was just the wrong medium, given how people who are interested in games are more likely to be at a computer or console. Maybe there is, or someday will be, a better market. Apparently CGS wasn’t able to realize it.
- Thoughts on OS XNovember 17 2008
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After using OS X for the past six months I’ve kept mentally jotting down random thoughts.
1. Apple, update your dev tools. Your GDB and GCC are ancient and buggy (almost four years old)!
2. Off-topic: Why do some Apple users get so whiny about Firefox missing unnoticeable UI aspects? Safari looks completely out of place on Windows.
3. OS X usually just works. The UI is infinitely better than Linux (which doesn’t say a lot) - it’s great to have a Unixy OS with a pleasing UI.
4. Functionality for Home/End is horrible and broken. Fix it.
5. Spaces rocks. On Windows I need multiple monitors; on Mac I only need one.
6. Macbook keyboards are crap, crap, crap. Half the keys I use frequently are missing. I realize other people might not use these, and I realize there are key combinations you can use instead. This creates yet another disparity I have to learn, which is odd as the disparity is between Mac products.
7. Macbook mouse button is crap too. Why do I need two hands, and three fingers to right click, when the button is clearly big enough to at least give the user option for one side to be biased toward right clicking?
8. Macbook crappiness: why is there no pointing stick? Fitts Law — repositioning hands to move between clicking and typing is a pain.
9. Macbook continued: are there nuclear reactions going on in the left back
- TraceMonkey and Type Instability in JavaScriptOctober 27 2008
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Work on TraceMonkey continues! TraceMonkey is Mozilla’s JavaScript JIT based on Franz-Gal trace compilation. The JIT ships with Firefox 3.1 and can be enabled in the beta via about:config. This article is about how TraceMonkey was recently changed to handle type changes in JavaScript data flow.
Introduction
The greatest advantage to a trace compiling JIT rather than a method compiling JIT, for dynamic languages, is type specialization. Observe the following loop:
function f(c) { for (var i = 0; i < 500; i++) c += 2; return c; }In a traditional JIT this method would need to be compiled generically enough to use all possible incoming types. The function could be invoked using either a string, object, number, or anything — and the compiled code must account for that. Optimizing further requires static analysis.
Type Specialization
TraceMonkey’s approach is remarkably different. If a hot path (loop) is encountered, the runtime behavior is observed, recorded, and compiled as a “trace tree.” If that loop is run using integers, the trace tree becomes a specialized
- SourceMod JIT ChangesOctober 20 2008
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A few months ago I made some major changes to the SourceMod JIT, the first major changes since the thing was originally written two years ago.
Pawn suffers from many problems. One of my (least) favorites is the lack of separation between a runtime and a context. Some language implementations don’t seem to have this either. Python, notably has a global runtime and no notion of a context as far as I can tell. SpiderMonkey abstracts both. Lua seems to have both and combines them into one structure.
Pawn historically shoved both a runtime (VM code+heap) and a context (thread stack+locals) into the same structure, and SourcePawn originally did the same. The problem was that once you created this structure, it was immutable. You couldn’t add code or data. Sharing between scripts meant jumping runtimes which is very expensive to marshal. Each plugin having its own runtime and context is a waste in every sense of the word.
Unfortunately the design of the VM doesn’t really let us fix that. References to memory are not typed, and references to global memory can’t be easily deduced at verification time. This makes it impossible to put multiple scripts into one structure with a common heap. For example:
const.pri 50 load.priThis is a load from global data at address BASE+50. SourcePawn is a straight-line JIT, and some form of data flow analysis would be needed to catch and relocate these references. Although we could change the comp
- Dude, that’s Gangsta - Driving across the USAOctober 12 2008
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I apologize for the lack of updates lately. Work is busy! Please enjoy (or don’t) this boring, non-coding writeup. A big article about recent work with trace compilation is coming up soon, I promise!
Back in May I drove across the country - from Rhode Island to California - with my friend Dan. I’m not sure how he managed (or why he even agreed) to put up with me through this, especially when our only entertainment was two Killers’ CDs, a Lewis Black CD, and some Family Guy. Our destination was San Jose where twisty lives (a friend from WPI).
The plan was simple: We’d drive out, stopping at random hotels when we got tired, and hit CA within four days. Dan would fly back after we relaxed for a bit, and I’d stick around for my new job.
As we drove across the country I took mental notes about the various states we went through. For all of these states we pretty much stayed entirely on I-90 W. It was a strange road. It can’t quite decide what its name is. Near the start of the mid-west it becomes “I-90/I-80″ and then just “I-80.”
Along this highway, up until Illinois or so, “rest stops” were big plazas with restaurants and tourist information. This fanciness stopped fairly quickly and as we delved further into the west, rest stops became so far apart and dilapidated (if not entirely