codegen: type-directed specialization — emit native ops where the type is statically known (#5334 Tier 3 / Lever E)

Follow-on to #5334. That issue tracked making perry's IR efficient for large/untyped modules; its Tier 1 (outline the dynamic machinery) and Tier 2 (emit less scaffolding) levers all shipped:

Lever A — outline field-SET guard-miss arm (perf(codegen): outline class-field-SET guard-miss arm to one call (#5334 lever A) #5351)
Lever B — full-outline IC diamond for oversized modules, SET + GET (perf(codegen): full-outline class-field IC diamond for oversized modules (#5334 lever B) #5385, perf(codegen): full-outline the class-field-GET diamond for oversized modules (#5391 path 2) #5410)
Lever C — fold nan-box bitcast round-trips at emit time (perf(codegen): fold nan-box bitcast round-trips at emit time (#5334 lever C) #5350)
Lever D — elide GC write-barrier for non-pointer field stores (perf(codegen): elide GC write barrier for non-pointer class-field stores (#5334 lever D) #5381)
(extra) outline array-literal construction (perf(codegen): outline array-literal construction for oversized modules (#5391) #5412)

This issue carries the one remaining lever, Tier 3 / Lever E: type-directed specialization — the strategic, long-term piece that #5334 explicitly deferred.

Goal

Where a value is statically a number / string / known-shape (real .ts, tsgo, or local inference), emit native ops instead of the dynamic form:

fadd / fmul / fcmp instead of js_add / js_rel_lt / IC guards
direct slot load/store instead of the inline-cache diamond
skip the nan-box round-trip entirely when the value never leaves a typed register

This attacks the two largest line-counts from #5334's measurement at the source — the 4.4M call @js_* and 365K js_typed_feedback_*_guard sites — rather than outlining them after the fact.

Why separate from #5334

It is a performance win, not just a size win — typed programs get both smaller and faster.
It is orthogonal to minified bundles: minified JS is Any almost everywhere, so static_type_of rarely resolves, and Lever E barely moves the needle there. The bundle-compilability goal of codegen: IR is ~96x bloated for large/untyped modules (1.25GB / ~15GB clang RSS for a 13MB bundle) — outline dynamic machinery + specialize #5334 is already met by Tiers 1–2.
It is a larger, architectural change (type propagation through HIR → codegen) that deserves its own tracking and sequencing.

Sketch

Thread a static-type signal to codegen op-emit sites (extend the existing static_type_of / class_field_declared_type machinery).
Number/boolean arithmetic + comparisons → native f64 ops, guarded only where the static type is number | undefined-ish.
Known-shape field access → direct slot, bypassing the IC diamond.
String concat / comparison on statically-string operands → direct runtime calls without the dynamic dispatch.
Measure on a typed hot-loop benchmark (IR-line reduction + wall-clock) and on a real .ts app; hard constraint carried over from codegen: IR is ~96x bloated for large/untyped modules (1.25GB / ~15GB clang RSS for a 13MB bundle) — outline dynamic machinery + specialize #5334: no runtime perf regression on real code.

Context: surfaced taking the 13 MB @anthropic-ai/claude-code cli.js through perry. Tiers 1–2 made untyped bundles compilable; this is the typed-code performance frontier.

perf(codegen): #5497 Lever E — unary -/+/~ and NumberCoerce are stati…

I’m working on a focused first slice of this tracker: threading existing static type information into a native-op specialization path, with IR/codegen regression coverage. I’ll keep the PR scoped and leave release/version metadata to maintainers.

Opened #8031 with the focused Boolean/native-numeric Lever E slice. Proven i1 booleans now feed native arithmetic/fcmp; annotation-only and invalidated facts retain the dynamic fallback.

Status: this is the surviving umbrella for Lever E. Keeping it open, with the current slice map.

Worth stating explicitly because #7294 (the engine plan tracker) is closed, so if this were closed too, type-directed specialization would have no strategic tracker — only scattered slices.

The architectural direction now lives in two merged documents: docs/representation-selection-rfc.md (416 lines) and docs/engine-plan.md (690 lines, canonical).

What has shipped against Lever E

Representation-selection RFC merged (docs: RFC — type-driven representation selection (unbox-by-default for typed values) #6901), Phase 1 canonical unboxed i32/u32 locals (perf(codegen): representation-selection Phase 1 — canonical unboxed i32 locals #6903), Phase 2 specialized ABI (perf(codegen): representation-selection Phase 2 — specialized calling convention (bounded monomorphization) #6905), Phase 3a canonical Str locals (perf(codegen): representation-selection Phase 3a — canonical string locals (tagged-at-rest Str rep) #6909)
perf(codegen): lower proven booleans into native numeric ops #8031 — the Boolean/native-numeric slice; proven i1 booleans feed native arithmetic and fcmp, with annotation-only and invalidated facts retaining the dynamic fallback
perf(codegen): guarded ordinary-parameter specialization #8094 — guarded ordinary-parameter specialization, recovering what fix(codegen): require runtime evidence for local binding types #8033 removed
perf(codegen): let a specialized entry re-enter itself #8167 — a specialized entry can re-enter itself; fib(40) 211.54 G → 4.66 G instructions (45.5x)

What is still open under it

issue
#8180	array-callback invocation, ~368 instructions/call — 77% of the `forEach` gap
#8103	element-shape fact for array-callback parameters — measured at only a ~23% ceiling, so #8180 should lead
#8099	class-typed parameters refused by guarded specialization
#8108 / #6812	the static write PIC still rejects any safepoint
#8171	#8167's residual 22% — a range test provably unnecessary where a branch already narrows the parameter
#8175	`fib40` IPC collapsed 6.30 → 1.92; instruction wins are not converting to time
#8079	the #8033 cliff — 8 of 9 regressed corpus rows still unrecovered

Two measured results that should shape the sequencing

Instruction count has stopped predicting time on this axis. perf(codegen): let a specialized entry re-enter itself #8167 cut instructions 45.5x and wall time only 13.9x. Any Lever E claim quoted in instructions alone can overstate the delivered win by ~3x — quote cycles or IPC alongside.
Dynamic-arith site count has stopped predicting cost. interp and iso_miss each lost 22 sites in the last round and got no faster (0.8528 → 0.8524, 0.9896 → 0.9901). The residual is concentrated — parseApply alone holds 30 of ~43 sites in both — so site-count sweeps are the wrong instrument here.

This issue's original framing still holds: minified bundles are Any almost everywhere so Lever E barely moves them, and the win is for typed programs. The corpus rows above are the measurable proxy.

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codegen: type-directed specialization — emit native ops where the type is statically known (#5334 Tier 3 / Lever E) #5497

Goal

Why separate from #5334

Sketch

Status: this is the surviving umbrella for Lever E. Keeping it open, with the current slice map.

What has shipped against Lever E

What is still open under it

Two measured results that should shape the sequencing

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codegen: type-directed specialization — emit native ops where the type is statically known (#5334 Tier 3 / Lever E) #5497

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Goal

Why separate from #5334

Sketch

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proggeramlug commented on Aug 13, 2026

proggeramlug commented on Aug 13, 2026

proggeramlug commented on Aug 15, 2026

Status: this is the surviving umbrella for Lever E. Keeping it open, with the current slice map.

What has shipped against Lever E

What is still open under it

Two measured results that should shape the sequencing

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