A Unique Performance Optimization for a 3D Geometry Language

4 months ago

Geoscript is a programming language specialized for generating and manipulating 3D geometry, used in a web app called Geotoy.
The language employs a tree-walking interpreter with optimizations like constant folding and common subexpression elimination (CSE).
Constant folding in Geoscript is highly effective because programs are pure functions with no external inputs, leading to precomputation of most operations.
Common Subexpression Elimination (CSE) was planned to optimize repeated identical expressions by hashing AST nodes and reusing computed values.
A unique optimization introduced is persistent expression caching, which reuses results from previous runs when the program is re-executed with minor changes.
This caching dramatically reduces execution time, especially for expensive operations like alpha_wrap in CGAL, improving the developer experience.
PRNG calls are handled by treating them as pure functions dependent on the RNG state, allowing them to be cached despite their mutable nature.
The optimization is inspired by build system caching techniques like those in Nix and Bazel, tailored for Geoscript's specific use case.

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