Re: Safety of enabling JIT

[Rik]

On 12/08/2013 10:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2013 00:33:14 +0200
> From: Susi Lehtola <address@hidden>
> To: Octave Maintainers List <address@hidden>
> Subject: Safety of enabling JIT
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
> Hi,
>
>
> configure reports
>   --enable-jit            (EXPERIMENTAL) enable JIT compiler
> but this seems to be the default when llvm is available.
>
> How safe is the option nowadays?

It *seems* safe.  First, even when the JIT compiler is built (configure
time decision) the compiler is not enabled at runtime.  To do so a user
either needs to invoke octave with the option --jit-compiler or use
"enable_jit (1)" from within Octave.  Second, there are a series of JIT
verification tests and they all pass.  The only contra-indication has been
some memory leaks and weirdness when running JIT under valgrind.  Although
this may point to a problem, it has never manifested itself in normal
operation.  It might just be something about the valgrind environment.
>  Can we enable it for the Fedora
> package?
I think so, for the reasons above.

Cheers,
Rik