path: root/lib/hipe/doc/src/hipe_app.xml

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  <header>
    <copyright>
      <year>1997</year><year>2016</year>
      <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder>
    </copyright>
    <legalnotice>
      Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
      you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
      You may obtain a copy of the License at
 
          http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

      Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
      distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
      WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
      See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
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    </legalnotice>

    <title>HiPE</title>
    <prepared></prepared>
    <responsible></responsible>
    <docno></docno>
    <approved></approved>
    <checked></checked>
    <date></date>
    <rev></rev>
    <file>hipe.xml</file>
  </header>
  <app>HiPE</app>
  <appsummary>The HiPE Application</appsummary>
  <description>
    <p>
      The normal way to native-compile an Erlang module using HiPE is to include the atom native 
      in the Erlang compiler options, as in:</p>
      <pre>
      1> <input>c(my_module, [native]).</input></pre>
      <p>Options to the HiPE compiler are then passed as follows:</p>
      <pre>
      1> <input>c(my_module, [native,{hipe,Options}]).</input></pre>
      <p>For on-line help in the Erlang shell, call <c>hipe:help()</c>. 
      Details on HiPE compiler options are given by <c>hipe:help_options()</c>.</p>
  </description>  
  <section>
    <title>Feature Limitations</title>
    <p>
      The HiPE compiler is in general compliant with the normal BEAM compiler,
      with respect to semantic behavior. There are however features in the BEAM compiler
      and the runtime system that have limited or no support for HiPE compiled modules.
    </p>
    <taglist>
      <tag>Stack traces</tag>
      <item><p>Stack traces returned from <seealso marker="erts:erlang#get_stacktrace/0">
      <c>erlang:get_stacktrace/0</c></seealso> or as part of <c>'EXIT'</c> terms
      can look incomplete if HiPE compiled functions are involved. Typically a stack trace
      will contain only BEAM compiled functions or only HiPE compiled functions, depending
      on where the exception was raised.</p>
      <p>Source code line numbers in stack traces are also not supported by HiPE compiled functions.</p>
      </item>

      <tag>Tracing</tag>
      <item><p>Erlang call trace is not supported by HiPE. Calling
      <seealso marker="erts:erlang#trace_pattern/3"><c>erlang:trace_pattern({M,F,A}, ...)</c></seealso>
      does not have any effect on HiPE compiled modules.</p>
      </item>

      <tag>NIFs</tag>
      <item><p>Modules compiled with HiPE can not call <seealso marker="erts:erlang#load_nif-2">
      <c>erlang:load_nif/2</c></seealso> to load NIFs.</p>
      </item>

      <tag>-on_load</tag>
      <item><p>Modules compiled with HiPE can not use
      <seealso marker="doc/reference_manual:code_loading#on_load"><c>-on_load()</c></seealso>
      directives.</p>
      </item>
    </taglist>

  </section>
  <section>
    <title>Performance Limitations</title>
    <p>
      The HiPE compiler does in general produce faster code than the
      BEAM compiler. There are however some situation when HiPE
      compiled code will perform worse than BEAM code.
    </p>
    <taglist>
      <tag>Mode switches</tag>
      <item><p>Every time a process changes from executing code in a
      HiPE compiled module to a BEAM compiled module (or vice versa),
      it will do a mode switch. This involves a certain amount of
      CPU overhead which can have a negative net impact if the
      process is switching back and forth without getting enough done in
      each mode.</p>
      </item>

      <tag>Optimization for <c>receive</c> with unique references</tag>
      <item><p>The BEAM compiler can do an optimization when
      a <c>receive</c> statement is <em>only</em> waiting for messages
      containing a reference created before the receive. All messages
      that existed in the queue when the reference was created will be
      bypassed, as they cannot possibly contain the reference. HiPE
      does not implement this optimization.</p>
      <p>An example of this is when
      <c>gen_server:call()</c> waits for the reply message.</p>
      </item>

    </taglist>
  </section>
  <section>
    <title>SEE ALSO</title>
    <p>
      <seealso marker="stdlib:c">c(3)</seealso>, 
      <seealso marker="compiler:compile">compile(3)</seealso>
    </p>
  </section>

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