Instruction merging and specialization in the SICStus Prolog virtual machine

Authors:
Henrik Nässén;Mats Carlsson;Konstantinos Sagonas
Affiliations:
Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Uppsala, Sweden;Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Uppsala, Sweden;Uppsala University, Sweden
Venue:
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming
Year:
2001

Citing 11
Cited 8

BrouHaHa- A portable Smalltalk interpreter

OOPSLA '87 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
Garbarge collection for Prolog based on WAM

Communications of the ACM
Warren's abstract machine: a tutorial reconstruction

Warren's abstract machine: a tutorial reconstruction
High-Performance Logic Programming with the Aquarius Prolog Compiler

Computer
Optimizing an ANSI C interpreter with superoperators

POPL '95 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Stack caching for interpreters

PLDI '95 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1995 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Optimizing direct threaded code by selective inlining

PLDI '98 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1998 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Threaded code

Communications of the ACM
Analyzing and compressing assembly code

SIGPLAN '84 Proceedings of the 1984 SIGPLAN symposium on Compiler construction
Optimising Bytecode Emulation for Prolog

PPDP '99 Proceedings of the International Conference PPDP'99 on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming
Metastructures versus Attributed Variables in the Context of Extensible Unification

PLILP '92 Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Programming Language Implementation and Logic Programming

From simulation to practice: cache performance study of a Prolog system

Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on Memory system performance
Towards description and optimization of abstract machines in an extension of prolog

LOPSTR'06 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Logic-based program synthesis and transformation
A generator of efficient abstract machine implementations and its application to emulator minimization

ICLP'05 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Logic Programming
The yap prolog system

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming - Prolog Systems
Sicstus prolog-the first 25 years

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming - Prolog Systems
The binprolog experience: Architecture and implementation choices for continuation passing prolog and first-class logic engines

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming - Prolog Systems
The language features and architecture of b-prolog

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming - Prolog Systems
Prolog performance on larger datasets

PADL'07 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Wanting to improve execution speed and reduce code size of SICStus Prolog programs, we embarked on a project whose aim was to systematically investigate combination and specialization of WAM instructions. Various variants of the SICStus Prolog virtual machine instruction set were designed, implemented, and their performance was evaluated against standard benchmarks and on big Prolog programs. In this paper, we describe our methodology in finding appropriate candicates for instruction merging and specialization, discuss related trade-offs, present detailed statistics and performance measurements that we gathered, and report on our experiences from our involvement in this feat. In short, our experience is positiv e: the speedup of performing instruction merging and specialization in the context of the SICStus emulator is approximately 10%, while the bytecode size reduction is about 15%.