The Joy of Programming

It's ridiculous how good I can feel after accomplishing a decent programming task smoothly. I almost feel a bit foolish getting pleasure from something so ... geeky. But it's a bit like a good run. It feels like you've done something worthwhile, even if it only benefits you.

Last evening, with the new MacBook Air on my lap, I cleaned up one of the last parts of the jSuneido compiler that I was uncomfortable with. I had already figured out what I wanted to do, and for once I didn't run into any unexpected problems, finishing tidily in the amount of time I had.

Previously, I'd been building a list of constants (other than strings and int's that Java handles) and then stuffing this list into the instance of the compiled class. Then, to speed things up in the generated code, I loaded an array of the constants into a local variable. It worked ok, but a lot of functions didn't need any constants. Unfortunately, I had to generate the load before I knew if there would be any. And it would be tricky to determine ahead of time if there would be any. Plus, ideally, constants should be static final so the optimizer would know they were constant.

With the new changes, I create a static final field for each constant, and then generate a  class initializer that initialized them. Accesses to the constants are simple GETSTATIC instructions. The only trick was how to get the list of constants from the compiler to the class initializer. I ended up using a static field (basically a global variable). A bit ugly, but I couldn't come up with a better way. To handle multi-threading I used a ThreadLocal. (My first thought was a ConcurrentHashMap keyed by ClassLoader, but ThreadLocal was simpler.)

I don't know how much difference this will make to performance, but I really wanted to generate code that was clean and similar to compiled Java. I think I'm pretty much there. (Apart from boxed integers and the extra layer of method/call dispatch.)

Damn! Reviewing the code as I write this I realize I missed something. (I use that list of constants in the instance for a couple of other minor things.) Oh well, can't take away how good I felt when I thought it had all gone smoothly! Good thing I'm not superstitious or I'd think I'd jinxed myself talking about how well it had gone :-) Hopefully it won't be too hard to handle.