Recoving dup tests for VMS
[p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git] / ext / B / README
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a8a597b2 1 Perl Compiler Kit, Version alpha4
2
3 Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, Malcolm Beattie
4
5 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
6 it under the terms of either:
7
8 a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
9 Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any
10 later version, or
11
12 b) the "Artistic License" which comes with this kit.
13
14 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
15 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
16 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See either
17 the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License for more details.
18
19 You should have received a copy of the Artistic License with this kit,
20 in the file named "Artistic". If not, you can get one from the Perl
21 distribution. You should also have received a copy of the GNU General
22 Public License, in the file named "Copying". If not, you can get one
8d814b80 23 from the Perl distribution or else write to the Free Software Foundation,
24 Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
a8a597b2 25
26CHANGES
27
28New since alpha3
29 Anonymous subs work properly with C and CC.
30 Heuristics for forcing compilation of apparently unused subs/methods.
31 Subs which use the AutoLoader module are forcibly loaded at compile-time.
32 Slightly faster compilation.
33 Handles slightly more complex code within a BEGIN { }.
34 Minor bug fixes.
35
36New since alpha2
37 CC backend now supports ".." and s//e.
38 Xref backend generates cross-reference reports
39 Cleanups to fix benign but irritating "-w" warnings
40 Minor cxstack fix
41New since alpha1
42 Working CC backend
43 Shared globs and pre-initialised hash support
44 Some XSUB support
45 Assorted bug fixes
46
47INSTALLATION
48
49(1) You need perl5.002 or later.
50
51(2) If you want to compile and run programs with the C or CC backends
52which undefine (or redefine) subroutines, then you need to apply a
53one-line patch to perl itself. One or two of the programs in perl's
54own test suite do this. The patch is in file op.patch. It prevents
55perl from calling free() on OPs with the magic sequence number (U16)-1.
56The compiler declares all OPs as static structures and uses that magic
57sequence number.
58
59(3) Type
60 perl Makefile.PL
61to write a personalised Makefile for your system. If you want the
62bytecode modules to support reading bytecode from strings (instead of
63just from files) then add the option
64 -DINDIRECT_BGET_MACROS
65into the middle of the definition of the CCCMD macro in the Makefile.
66Your C compiler may need to be able to cope with Standard C for this.
67I haven't tested this option yet with an old pre-Standard compiler.
68
69(4) If your platform supports dynamic loading then just type
70 make
71and you can then use
72 perl -Iblib/arch -MO=foo bar
73to use the compiler modules (see later for details).
74If you need/want instead to make a statically linked perl which
75contains the appropriate modules, then type
76 make perl
77 make byteperl
78and you can then use
79 ./perl -MO=foo bar
80to use the compiler modules.
81In both cases, the byteperl executable is required for running standalone
82bytecode programs. It is *not* a standard perl+XSUB perl executable.
83
84USAGE
85
86As of the alpha3 release, the Bytecode, C and CC backends are now all
87functional enough to compile almost the whole of the main perl test
88suite. In the case of the CC backend, any failures are all due to
89differences and/or known bugs documented below. See the file TESTS.
90In the following examples, you'll need to replace "perl" by
91 perl -Iblib/arch
92if you have built the extensions for a dynamic loading platform but
93haven't installed the extensions completely. You'll need to replace
94"perl" by
95 ./perl
96if you have built the extensions into a statically linked perl binary.
97
98(1) To compile perl program foo.pl with the C backend, do
99 perl -MO=C,-ofoo.c foo.pl
100Then use the cc_harness perl program to compile the resulting C source:
101 perl cc_harness -O2 -o foo foo.c
102
103If you are using a non-ANSI pre-Standard C compiler that can't handle
104pre-declaring static arrays, then add -DBROKEN_STATIC_REDECL to the
105options you use:
106 perl cc_harness -O2 -o foo -DBROKEN_STATIC_REDECL foo.c
107If you are using a non-ANSI pre-Standard C compiler that can't handle
108static initialisation of structures with union members then add
109-DBROKEN_UNION_INIT to the options you use. If you want command line
110arguments passed to your executable to be interpreted by perl (e.g. -Dx)
111then compile foo.c with -DALLOW_PERL_OPTIONS. Otherwise, all command line
112arguments passed to foo will appear directly in @ARGV. The resulting
113executable foo is the compiled version of foo.pl. See the file NOTES for
114extra options you can pass to -MO=C.
115
116There are some constraints on the contents on foo.pl if you want to be
117able to compile it successfully. Some problems can be fixed fairly easily
118by altering foo.pl; some problems with the compiler are known to be
119straightforward to solve and I'll do so soon. The file Todo lists a
120number of known problems. See the XSUB section lower down for information
121about compiling programs which use XSUBs.
122
123(2) To compile foo.pl with the CC backend (which generates actual
124optimised C code for the execution path of your perl program), use
125 perl -MO=CC,-ofoo.c foo.pl
126
127and proceed just as with the C backend. You should almost certainly
128use an option such as -O2 with the subsequent cc_harness invocation
129so that your C compiler uses optimisation. The C code generated by
130the Perl compiler's CC backend looks ugly to humans but is easily
131optimised by C compilers.
132
133To make the most of this compiler backend, you need to tell the
134compiler when you're using int or double variables so that it can
135optimise appropriately (although this part of the compiler is the most
136buggy). You currently do that by naming lexical variables ending in
137"_i" for ints, "_d" for doubles, "_ir" for int "register" variables or
138"_dr" for double "register" variables. Here "register" is a promise
139that you won't pass a reference to the variable into a sub which then
140modifies the variable. The compiler ought to catch attempts to use
141"\$i" just as C compilers catch attempts to do "&i" for a register int
142i but it doesn't at the moment. Bugs in the CC backend may make your
143program fail in mysterious ways and give wrong answers rather than just
144crash in boring ways. But, hey, this is an alpha release so you knew
145that anyway. See the XSUB section lower down for information about
146compiling programs which use XSUBs.
147
148If your program uses classes which define methods (or other subs which
149are not exported and not apparently used until runtime) then you'll
150need to use -u compile-time options (see the NOTES file) to force the
151subs to be compiled. Future releases will probably default the other
152way, do more auto-detection and provide more fine-grained control.
153
154Since compiled executables need linking with libperl, you may want
155to turn libperl.a into a shared library if your platform supports
156it. For example, with Digital UNIX, do something like
157 ld -shared -o libperl.so -all libperl.a -none -lc
158and with Linux/ELF, rebuild the perl .c files with -fPIC (and I
159also suggest -fomit-frame-pointer for Linux on Intel architetcures),
160do "make libperl.a" and then do
161 gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libperl.so.5 -o libperl.so.5.3 `ar t libperl.a`
162and then
163 # cp libperl.so.5.3 /usr/lib
164 # cd /usr/lib
165 # ln -s libperl.so.5.3 libperl.so.5
166 # ln -s libperl.so.5 libperl.so
167 # ldconfig
168When you compile perl executables with cc_harness, append -L/usr/lib
169otherwise the -L for the perl source directory will override it. For
170example,
171 perl -Iblib/arch -MO=CC,-O2,-ofoo3.c foo3.bench
172 perl cc_harness -o foo3 -O2 foo3.c -L/usr/lib
173 ls -l foo3
174 -rwxr-xr-x 1 mbeattie xzdg 11218 Jul 1 15:28 foo3
175You'll probably also want to link your main perl executable against
176libperl.so; it's nice having an 11K perl executable.
177
178(3) To compile foo.pl into bytecode do
179 perl -MO=Bytecode,-ofoo foo.pl
180To run the resulting bytecode file foo as a standalone program, you
181use the program byteperl which should have been built along with the
182extensions.
183 ./byteperl foo
184Any extra arguments are passed in as @ARGV; they are not interpreted
185as perl options. If you want to load chunks of bytecode into an already
186running perl program then use the -m option and investigate the
187byteload_fh and byteload_string functions exported by the B module.
188See the NOTES file for details of these and other options (including
189optimisation options and ways of getting at the intermediate "assembler"
190code that the Bytecode backend uses).
191
192(3) There are little Bourne shell scripts and perl programs to aid with
193some common operations: assemble, disassemble, run_bytecode_test,
194run_test, cc_harness, test_harness, test_harness_bytecode.
195
196(4) Walk the op tree in execution order printing terse info about each op
197 perl -MO=Terse,exec foo.pl
198
199(5) Walk the op tree in syntax order printing lengthier debug info about
200each op. You can also append ",exec" to walk in execution order, but the
201formatting is designed to look nice with Terse rather than Debug.
202 perl -MO=Debug foo.pl
203
204(6) Produce a cross-reference report of the line numbers at which all
205variables, subs and formats are defined and used.
206 perl -MO=Xref foo.pl
207
208XSUBS
209
210The C and CC backends can successfully compile some perl programs which
211make use of XSUB extensions. [I'll add more detail to this section in a
212later release.] As a prerequisite, such extensions must not need to do
213anything in their BOOT: section which needs to be done at runtime rather
214than compile time. Normally, the only code in the boot_Foo() function is
215a list of newXS() calls which xsubpp puts there and the compiler handles
216saving those XS subs itself. For each XSUB used, the C and CC compiler
217will generate an initialiser in their C output which refers to the name
218of the relevant C function (XS_Foo_somesub). What is not yet automated
219is the necessary commands and cc command-line options (e.g. via
220"perl cc_harness") which link against the extension libraries. For now,
221you need the XSUB extension to have installed files in the right format
222for using as C libraries (e.g. Foo.a or Foo.so). As the Foo.so files (or
223your platform's version) aren't suitable for linking against, you will
224have to reget the extension source and rebuild it as a static extension
225to force the generation of a suitable Foo.a file. Then you need to make
226a symlink (or copy or rename) of that file into a libFoo.a suitable for
227cc linking. Then add the appropriate -L and -l options to your
228"perl cc_harness" command line to find and link against those libraries.
229You may also need to fix up some platform-dependent environment variable
230to ensure that linked-against .so files are found at runtime too.
231
232DIFFERENCES
233
234The result of running a compiled Perl program can sometimes be different
235from running the same program with standard perl. Think of the compiler
236as having a slightly different implementation of the language Perl.
237Unfortunately, since Perl has had a single implementation until now,
238there are no formal standards or documents defining what behaviour is
239guaranteed of Perl the language and what just "happens to work".
240Some of the differences below are almost impossible to change because of
241the way the compiler works. Others can be changed to produce "standard"
242perl behaviour if it's deemed proper and the resulting performance hit
243is accepted. I'll use "standard perl" to mean the result of running a
244Perl program using the perl executable from the perl distribution.
245I'll use "compiled Perl program" to mean running an executable produced
246by this compiler kit ("the compiler") with the CC backend.
247
248Loops
249 Standard perl calculates the target of "next", "last", and "redo"
250 at run-time. The compiler calculates the targets at compile-time.
251 For example, the program
252
253 sub skip_on_odd { next NUMBER if $_[0] % 2 }
254 NUMBER: for ($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++) {
255 skip_on_odd($i);
256 print $i;
257 }
258
259 produces the output
260 024
261 with standard perl but gives a compile-time error with the compiler.
262
263Context of ".."
264 The context (scalar or array) of the ".." operator determines whether
265 it behaves as a range or a flip/flop. Standard perl delays until
266 runtime the decision of which context it is in but the compiler needs
267 to know the context at compile-time. For example,
268 @a = (4,6,1,0,0,1);
269 sub range { (shift @a)..(shift @a) }
270 print range();
271 while (@a) { print scalar(range()) }
272 generates the output
273 456123E0
274 with standard Perl but gives a compile-time error with compiled Perl.
275
276Arithmetic
277 Compiled Perl programs use native C arithemtic much more frequently
278 than standard perl. Operations on large numbers or on boundary
279 cases may produce different behaviour.
280
281Deprecated features
282 Features of standard perl such as $[ which have been deprecated
283 in standard perl since version 5 was released have not been
284 implemented in the compiler.
285
286Others
287 I'll add to this list as I remember what they are.
288
289BUGS
290
291Here are some things which may cause the compiler problems.
292
293The following render the compiler useless (without serious hacking):
294* Use of the DATA filehandle (via __END__ or __DATA__ tokens)
295* Operator overloading with %OVERLOAD
296* The (deprecated) magic array-offset variable $[ does not work
297* The following operators are not yet implemented for CC
298 goto
299 sort with a non-default comparison (i.e. a named sub or inline block)
300* You can't use "last" to exit from a non-loop block.
301
302The following may give significant problems:
303* BEGIN blocks containing complex initialisation code
304* Code which is only ever referred to at runtime (e.g. via eval "..." or
305 via method calls): see the -u option for the C and CC backends.
306* Run-time lookups of lexical variables in "outside" closures
307
308The following may cause problems (not thoroughly tested):
309* Dependencies on whether values of some "magic" Perl variables are
310 determined at compile-time or runtime.
311* For the C and CC backends: compile-time strings which are longer than
312 your C compiler can cope with in a single line or definition.
313* Reliance on intimate details of global destruction
314* For the Bytecode backend: high -On optimisation numbers with code
315 that has complex flow of control.
316* Any "-w" option in the first line of your perl program is seen and
317 acted on by perl itself before the compiler starts. The compiler
318 itself then runs with warnings turned on. This may cause perl to
319 print out warnings about the compiler itself since I haven't tested
320 it thoroughly with warnings turned on.
321
322There is a terser but more complete list in the Todo file.
323
324Malcolm Beattie
3252 September 1996