Abstract
In the context of the dynamically typed concurrent functional programming language Erlang, we describe a simple static analysis for identifying variables containing floating point numbers, how this information is used by the BEAM compiler, and a scheme for efficient (just-in-time) compilation of floating point bytecode instructions to native code. The attractiveness of the scheme lies in its implementation simplicity. It has been fully incorporated in Erlang/OTP R9, and improves the performance of Erlang programs manipulating floats considerably. We also show that by using this scheme, Erlang/OTP, despite being an implementation of a dynamically typed language, achieves performance which is competitive with that of state-of-the-art implementations of strongly typed strict functional languages on floating point intensive programs.
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Lindahl, T., Sagonas, K. (2003). Unboxed Compilation of Floating Point Arithmetic in a Dynamically Typed Language Environment. In: Peña, R., Arts, T. (eds) Implementation of Functional Languages. IFL 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2670. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44854-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44854-3_9
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