I see in the unity RFC that AOT execution is a goal. From looking at the unity branch, it doesn’t seem like this is implemented yet-- I don’t see any c codegens in src/relax/backend/contrib and I don’t see AOTExecutor referenced in the relax compilation flow
Can someone confirm that AOT codegen is not supported in Unity? And assuming it is not supported, I was wondering how soon this is being planned for?
As of now there is a compiled mode in the relax vm, that compiles most of the graph code to executables. However, due to the fact that we would need to support a richer set of data structures, we would need a runtime that also supports things like object system to get a full set of features. In some sense this compiled mode can be viewed as AOT with a richer set of runtime support
Note that this was different from the original AOT executor. In that case it would be more akin to a limited set of runtime for resource constrained setting. In such cases, likely we won’t be able to get a full set of unity features(especially those that comes with nested data structures and recursive objects), but it may indeed be possible to create a backend for the limited usecases. As of now this part is not supported, and likely would need community’s involvement depending on interest in this area.
Ok that makes sense. It doesn’t sound like the compiled mode generates a binary for bare metal, which is what I’m looking for. In my opinion unity would be a good fit for bare-metal/resource-constrained settings because of its plan to support inplace dataflow blocks, which can yield large memory savings.