Miniboxed Value Encoding

Three papers best describe the miniboxing transformation and benchmarks:

Miniboxing (OOPSLA 2013) - the first miniboxing paper, describing the representation,
Late Data Layout (OOPSLA 2014) - the foundation of miniboxing (also described in detail here) and
Miniboxing the Linked List (tech report) - describes the miniboxing transformation for Scala collections.

The miniboxing plugin encodes all primitive values into long integers. To find out why, see the following resources:

Paper and Poster

Paper errata:

We were notified by our peers that one of the times reported is impossible to reproduce. While this does not affect the paper's contributions, we would like explain the discrepancy in detail:

Table 3 lists the times taken by the List create microbenchmark for the generic case as:

16.7ms for the "Single context" case
1841ms for the "Multi context" case

The number from the "Multi context" case was very noisy (with a standard deviation of 1068ms as shown in the first version of the paper) and we are also not able to reproduce it. We think this number was affected by a job running on the server we used for benchmarking, which would explain the long running time and the huge standard deviation seen in the measurements. Our expectation is that the numbers for "Single context" and "Multi context" should be comparable. The measurements taken on the Graal virtual machine (in Table 4) exhibit this expected behavior. We apologize for not double-checking this number, misleading other authors who tried to reproduce it.

Talks

Devoxx UK 2015 (London, UK)

Miniboxing Warnings (PNWScala, Portalnd, OR)

Miniboxing Transformation (ScalaDays 2014 Berlin, Germany)

Other Resources

Earlier material is available in the miniboxing plugin repository, in the docs directory and on speakerdeck.

Comments

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If you found a bug, please let us know on the github issue tracker.

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