In the previous article, we saw how to compile functions and handle their scopes. We also saw how to optimize a certain kind of function calls, the tail call ones in Understanding tail call optimization, now we are going to see yet another optimization, this time on conditions and expression evaluation.
Basic way to deal with conditionals
Following the previous article(s), we could implement and
/ or
as follows:
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As you can see, each argument have to be evaluated before calling the operator, which is not something we might want! In mainstream languages like C, C++, Java, Python… the expression a and b
would evaluate b
only if a
is true. If a
is false, no need to evaluate the rest of the expression: it will be false. Same thing goes for or
, if a
is true, no need to evaluate the rest of the expression: it will be true.
Understanding how short-circuiting works
What we want is evaluate arguments one at a time in an expression, and immediately stop if we have a false in an and
expression, or true in an or
expression. In Python you could write it like this:
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- (and) We check if
a
is true, if not do nothing. Otherwise, evaluateb
and act accordingly. - (or) We check if
a
is true and execute our code. Otherwise evaluateb
and if true execute our code.
Implementation in bytecode
Let’s see how and
is implemented in ArkScript (as of 16/09/2024):
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- We load our
a
variable as before and duplicate it - We duplicate it for later use
- We pop the duplicate, if it is false we jump after the expression, on the next instruction (which could be a store or another compare ; thanks to the duplicate, we still have the false value here at the end
- If it is true, we pop the original value, we don’t need it anymore and just load
b
. As in3.
we continue with no special treatment with the next instruction, now having our boolean loaded to compare it, store it…
And that’s it, we don’t have to have a specific implementation to handle if a and b
and val = a and b
separately, as we jump on the next instruction, which might be a POP_JUMP_IF_FALSE
in the case of a condition (to avoid executing the code of the condition), or a STORE
in case of a variable assignment.
ℹ️ Note
Implementing
or
would be practically identical, apart from thePOP_JUMP_IF_FALSE
instruction that would be aPOP_JUMP_IF_TRUE
!