At first I thought -- oh, cool, a suite of tools leveraging LLVM's XRay! But then after digging for a bit, I can't tell exactly what this does or how it does it, but it is not quite clear whether it leverages LLVM's XRay. Oh well, it's interesting enough. Buuuut -- they trademarked 'OpenResty XRay'? Seems like it's on the hairy edge of 'confusingly similar' -- it's definitely intended for tracing/introspection.
OpenResty filed for their trademark in 2020 and LLVM XRay goes back at least to ~2016/2017. OpenResty itself has been around since ~2011? But I couldn't find anything in google regarding OpenResty XRay before 2016.
Anyways, interesting spelunking. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong. LLVM's license permits this kind of commercialization -- if it were the case here.
Searching on X-?Ray debugging, I see a lot of products from separate vendors so I think it's valid to consider XRay alone a general industry term that is based on an obvious analogy, so disputes hopefully have to relate to an entire trademarked name.
Thanks for pointing this out. To be frank, I would not have expected to see someone highly competent attempting to build a core product with Raku, let alone what looks to be an not entirely trivial compiler. I didn't realize that in addition to being a luajit expert agentzh is also a long-time perl hacker.
Amusingly though he found it necessary to write his own proprietary implementation of (a "dialect" of?) Raku, compiling to luajit byte code.
The percentages of improvement that result from finding and tuning the worst paths in a system are often this good unless it has already been done once for the system.. Sun engineers put a lot of thought into algorithms and where bottlenecks should be but still had some improvements like this when first applying DTrace.
Lua's a little more opaque than Python or JS, a little more flexible, a little more bug-prone, and a lot simpler. But those aren't the reasons VLC and Wireshark and WoW use Lua instead of Python or JS; they use it because it's enormously less costly to embed. Imagine you decide to switch from Lua to Python for your game. Now you have:
- 3600 kilobytes of bloat instead of 110;
- a huge and bug-prone ABI to deal with to make sure Python doesn't inject memory leaks;
- Python assholes publicly shaming you for using an unfashionable version of Python.
> OpenResty XRay
At first I thought -- oh, cool, a suite of tools leveraging LLVM's XRay! But then after digging for a bit, I can't tell exactly what this does or how it does it, but it is not quite clear whether it leverages LLVM's XRay. Oh well, it's interesting enough. Buuuut -- they trademarked 'OpenResty XRay'? Seems like it's on the hairy edge of 'confusingly similar' -- it's definitely intended for tracing/introspection.
OpenResty filed for their trademark in 2020 and LLVM XRay goes back at least to ~2016/2017. OpenResty itself has been around since ~2011? But I couldn't find anything in google regarding OpenResty XRay before 2016.
Anyways, interesting spelunking. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong. LLVM's license permits this kind of commercialization -- if it were the case here.