Optimization of dynamic languages using hierarchical layering of virtual machines

  • Authors:

  • Alexander Yermolovich;Christian Wimmer;Michael Franz

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA;University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA;University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • DLS '09 Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Dynamic languages
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Creating an interpreter is a simple and fast way to implement a dynamic programming language. With this ease also come major drawbacks. Interpreters are significantly slower than compiled machine code because they have a high dispatch overhead and cannot perform optimizations. To overcome these limitations, interpreters are commonly combined with just-in-time compilers to improve the overall performance. However, this means that a just-in-time compiler has to be implemented for each language. We explore the approach of taking an interpreter of a dynamic language and running it on top of an optimizing trace-based virtual machine, i.e., we run a guest VM on top of a host VM. The host VM uses trace recording to observe the guest VM executing the application program. Each recorded trace represents a sequence of guest VM bytecodes corresponding to a given execution path through the application program. The host VM optimizes and compiles these traces to machine code, thus eliminating the need for a custom just-in-time compiler for the guest VM. The guest VM only needs to provide basic information about its interpreter loop to the host VM.