Using Co-dfns to Accelerate APL Code

Blog post from Aaron Hsu’s (Indiana University, USA) presentation Wednesday 9th September.
By Vibeke Ulmann #Dyalog15
For the past 2-3 years Aaron and Dyalog have been collaborating on creating a new compiler. This is an Open Source project and the compiler – which is currently in ‘Version 0.5’, is available as a zip download from Github. Aaron started by showing us how to download, unzip and set-up the compiler. It is available for both Windows and Linux platforms.
This was a live coding session (working on the Window platform) where Aaron demonstrate some of the feature/functionality expected to go into Version 1 of the compiler. He then proceeded to do a number of blackscholes benchmark, working various Co-dfns implementations, in order to demonstrate the order of magnitude of speedup’s for chosen expressions. The performance speedup’s achieved were  60% -93% or, as Aaron prefers to see it, 3 – 10 times speed-,up , so significant improvements can be had by using the compiler. However, there is still work to be done in terms of implementing more expressions, and Aaron encouraged everyone to download the compiler, play with it, and most importantly – try to break it – as he needs feedback in order to start bug fixing.
The compiler is targeted solely at dfns and you will need access to a c-compiler on your machine. Also only 0-origin code is accepted for now.
There is a lot of additional information available on the Github wiki, so please visit Github, get hold of the Compiler and start playing!!