Portable just-in-time specialization of dynamically typed scripting languages

Authors:
Kevin Williams;Jason McCandless;David Gregg
Affiliations:
Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland;Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland;Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Venue:
LCPC'09 Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing
Year:
2009

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a portable approach to JIT compilation for dynamically typed scripting languages. At runtime we generate ANSI C code and use the system's native C compiler to compile this code. The C compiler runs on a separate thread to the interpreter allowing program execution to continue during JIT compilation. Dynamic languages have variables which may change type at any point in execution. Our interpreter profiles variable types at both whole method and partial method granularity. When a frequently executed region of code is discovered, the compilation thread generates a specialized version of the region based on the profiled types. In this paper, we evaluate the level of instruction specialization achieved by our profiling scheme as well as the overall performance of our JIT.