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A portable approach to dynamic optimization in run-time specialization

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Abstract

This paper proposes arun-time bytecode specialization (BCS) technique that analyzes programs and generates specialized programs at run-time in an intermediate language. By using an intermediate language for code generation, a back-end system canoptimize the specialized programs after specialization. The system uses Java virtual machine language (JVML) as the intermediate language, which allows the system to easily achieve practicalportability and to use existing sophisticated just-in-time (JIT) compilers as its back-end. The binding-time analysis algorithm is based on a type system, and covers a non-object-oriented subset of JVML. The specializer generates programs on a per-instruction basis, and can performmethod inlining at run-time. Our performance measurements show that a non-trivial application program specialized at run-time by BCS runs approximately 3–4 times faster than the unspecialized one. Despite the large overhead of JIT compilation of specialized code, we observed that the overall performance of the application can be improved.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Graphics and Computer Science Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Hidehiko Masuhara

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Akinori Yonezawa

Authors
  1. Hidehiko Masuhara
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  2. Akinori Yonezawa
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Additional information

This paper is an extended version of “A Portable Approach to Generating Optimized Specialized Code”, inProceedings of Second Symposium on Programs as Data Objects (PADO-II), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2053, pp. 138–154, Aarhus, Denmark, May 2001.23)

Hidehiko Masuhara, D.Sc.: He is an Assistant Professor at Department of Graphics and Computer Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo. He received his B.S., M.S. and D.Sc. degrees from Department of Information Science, University of Tokyo in 1992, 1994, and 1999, respectively. His research interests are in programming languages, especially in mechanisms to support flexible and efficient computation such as dynamic optimization and reflection. He received the best-paper award from Information Processing Society of Japan in 1996.

Akinori Yonezawa, Ph.D.: He is a Professor of computer science at Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo. He received Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. His current major research interests are in the areas of concurrent/parallel computation models, programming languages, object-oriented computing, and distributed computing. He is the designer of an object-oriented concurrent language ABCL/1 and the editor of several books and served as an associate editor of ACM Transaction of Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS). Since 1998, he has been an ACM Fellow.

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Masuhara, H., Yonezawa, A. A portable approach to dynamic optimization in run-time specialization. NGCO 20, 101–124 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037261

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