Mono updates

I posted a list of areas that we are working on for the Mono 1.2 release. Mono 1.0 has been fairly stable, we will likely issue a bug fix release with a few bug fixes in the next couple of weeks.

Massimiliano has checked a of the Arrays Bounds Check Eliminations to CVS. See his results. This will help with computationally intensive tests. He is now working on a framework to implement Partial Redundancy Elimination for Mono (SSAPRE) as well as prototyping a new relocation feature to improve Ahead-of-Time compiled binaries memory footprint.

In the meantime Ben and Duncan have been doing some optimizations to the code: many small tree optimizations, peephole optimizations and implementing a few tricks to reduce the size of generated code: each one giving a percent here, a percent there. Ben also has started the work to add precise garbage collection to Mono: now we track precisely everywhere where we keep handles to managed memory. The immediate side effect with Boehm's GC is a 3% performance improvement in the MCS bootstrap. For smaller programs, the visible effect is much larger.

On the subject of JITs, Neale's support for s390 keeps on improving, we will likely back port these changes to the 1-0 branch.

Spain, France

We can finally travel again outside the United States. Maria and myself are planning on spending a couple of weeks in Europe visiting some friends in France and Spain (Paris and Madrid will be in the plan). Will be glad to meet folks during our trip. I will also attend Brainshare Europe in Barcelona in September.