AtomVM Daily: JIT Performance Boost and CI Adjustments
AtomVM's JIT compiler received significant performance optimizations replacing linear searches with logarithmic maps and reducing dispatch overhead. A concurrent CI timeout adjustment suggests these improvements may have impacted build times.
Duration: PT1M50S
Transcript
Good morning, this is AtomVM Daily for June 5th, 2026.
The big story today is a substantial performance optimization to AtomVM's just-in-time compiler that should make code compilation noticeably faster across all supported architectures.
The core improvement centers on algorithmic efficiency in the JIT pipeline. Pull request 2322 replaced order-n list lookups with order-log-n map structures for frequently accessed data during compilation. For developers, this means the more complex your code, the more dramatic the speedup - what used to slow down linearly with code size now scales logarithmically. The changes also batch small instruction emissions into single operations, reducing the overhead of native interface calls during code generation.
These optimizations touch every JIT architecture that AtomVM supports - ARM 64, ARM 32, ARM version 6M, and both 32 and 64-bit RISC-V implementations. That's comprehensive coverage ensuring consistent performance gains regardless of your target platform.
Interestingly, we also see a CI infrastructure adjustment in pull request 2327, which bumped timeout values specifically for macOS build workflows. While the description doesn't explicitly connect this to the JIT changes, the timing suggests the performance optimizations may have affected compilation patterns enough to require longer CI runs on Apple's platform.
What this means for your development workflow: expect faster build times when working with larger codebases, and if you're doing performance-critical work on embedded platforms, the reduced JIT overhead should translate to more predictable execution characteristics.
That's your AtomVM update for today - faster compilation across the board with platform-specific CI adjustments to match.