To see the benchmarks we performed, have a look at the OOPSLA 2013 paper we just prepared. They include performance evaluations, bytecode size comparisons and many more. Also, the docs directory contains a series of papers and presentations which explain many aspects of the miniboxing transformation.

Using the Plugin

At this point, the miniboxing plugin is not production-ready, although it can compile spire. However, we do publish a nightly maven artifact on Sonatype, so anyone can try the current transformation. To get started, have a look at the example project we prepared.

Mind the gap: there are still many bugs and known limitations, so you're in for a thrill! Also, don't hesitate to add bugs to the tracker, good reductions that can be easily reproduced are highly appreciated!

Hacking the Plugin

The wiki is a good place to start looking into installing, testing, benchmarking and hacking on the miniboxing plugin. Also have a look at the docs directory, which contains some good resources.

The development branches are:

• master is always stable, usually outdated
• wip is pretty stable, usually has the last resonably stable developments
• topic/erasure-rebase contains the most recent developments, but expect tests to be broken most of the time

Repository organization

• wip is the working branch, most current version of the plugin
• master is usually a bit behind wip, but should be stable (alpha-stable, not production-ready!)
• sbt is used for compilation and testing
• the repository contains several sbt sub-projects:
  • components/plugin - the actual Scala compiler plugin
  • components/runtime - the runtime support for the transformed code
  • components/classloader - the classloader used for runtime class specialization
  • tests/benchmarks - the benchmarks for the project
  • tests/correctness - the tests for the plugin transformation
  • docs - documents released as the development goes on

Questions?

If you have any question, you can contact me at vlad dot ureche at epfl dot ch.