research-article

The efficient handling of guards in the design of RPython's tracing JIT

Authors:

David Schneider,

Carl Friedrich BolzAuthors Info & Claims

VMIL '12: Proceedings of the sixth ACM workshop on Virtual machines and intermediate languages

Pages 3 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/2414740.2414743

Published: 21 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Tracing just-in-time (JIT) compilers record linear control flow paths, inserting operations called guards at points of possible divergence. These operations occur frequently in generated traces and therefore it is important to design and implement them carefully to find the right trade-off between deoptimization, memory overhead, and (partly) execution speed. In this paper, we perform an empirical analysis of runtime properties of guards. This is used to guide the design of guards in the RPython tracing JIT.

References

[1]

D. Ancona, M. Ancona, A. Cuni, and N. D. Matsakis. RPython: a step towards reconciling dynamically and statically typed OO languages. In DLS, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2007. ACM.

Digital Library

[2]

V. Bala, E. Duesterwald, and S. Banerjia. Dynamo: A Transparent Dynamic Optimization System. In PLDI 2000.

Digital Library

[3]

M. Bebenita, F. Brandner, M. Fahndrich, F. Logozzo, W. Schulte, N. Tillmann, and H. Venter. SPUR: a trace-based JIT compiler for CIL. In OOPSLA, Reno/Tahoe, Nevada, USA, 2010. ACM.

Digital Library

[4]

M. Bebenita, M. Chang, G. Wagner, A. Gal, C. Wimmer, and M. Franz. Trace-based compilation in execution environments without interpreters. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Programming in Java, pages 59--68, Vienna, Austria, 2010. ACM.

Digital Library

[5]

C. F. Bolz, A. Cuni, M. FijaBkowski, M. Leuschel, S. Pedroni, and A. Rigo. Allocation removal by partial evaluation in a tracing JIT. In PEPM, Austin, Texas, USA, 2011.

Digital Library

[6]

C. F. Bolz, A. Cuni, M. FijaBkowski, M. Leuschel, S. Pedroni, and A. Rigo. Runtime feedback in a meta-tracing JIT for efficient dynamic languages. ICOOOLPS'11, page 9:1--9:8. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[7]

C. F. Bolz, A. Cuni, M. FijaBkowski, and A. Rigo. Tracing the meta-level: PyPy's tracing JIT compiler. In ICOOOLPS, pages 18--25, Genova, Italy, 2009. ACM.

Digital Library

[8]

C. F. Bolz, A. Kuhn, A. Lienhard, N. Matsakis, O. Nierstrasz, L. Renggli, A. Rigo, and T. Verwaest. Back to the future in one week -- implementing a Smalltalk VM in PyPy. In Self-Sustaining Systems, pages 123--139. 2008.

Digital Library

[9]

C. F. Bolz, M. Leuschel, and D. Schneider. Towards a jitting VM for prolog execution. In PPDP, Hagenberg, Austria, 2010. ACM.

Digital Library

[10]

O. Callaú, R. Robbes, É. Tanter, and D. Röthlisberger. How developers use the dynamic features of programming languages: the case of Smalltalk. In Proceedings of the 8th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR'11, page 23--32. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[11]

R. Cytron, J. Ferrante, B. K. Rosen, M. N. Wegman, and F. K. Zadeck. Efficiently computing static single assignment form and the control dependence graph. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 13(4):451--490, 1991.

Digital Library

[12]

L. P. Deutsch and A. M. Schiffman. Efficient implementation of the Smalltalk-80 system. In POPL, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1984. ACM.

Digital Library

[13]

A. Gal, M. Franz, B. Eich, M. Shaver, and D. Anderson. Trace-based Just-in-Time Type Specialization for Dynamic Languages. In PLDI 2009.

Digital Library

[14]

A. Gal, C. W. Probst, and M. Franz. HotpathVM: An Effective JIT Compiler for Resource-constrained Devices. VEE 2006, pages 144--153. ACM, 2006.

Digital Library

[15]

A. Holkner and J. Harland. Evaluating the dynamic behaviour of Python applications. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Australasian Conference on Computer Science - Volume 91, pages 19--28, Wellington, New Zealand, 2009. Australian Computer Society, Inc.

Digital Library

[16]

U. Hölzle, C. Chambers, and D. Ungar. Debugging optimized code with dynamic deoptimization. PLDI'92, page 32--43. ACM, 1992.

Digital Library

[17]

T. Kotzmann and H. Mossenbock. Run-time support for optimizations based on escape analysis. CGO'07, page 49--60, Washington, DC, USA, 2007. IEEE Computer Society.

Digital Library

[18]

T. Kotzmann and H. Mössenböck. Escape analysis in the context of dynamic compilation and deoptimization. VEE'05, page 111--120. ACM, 2005.

Digital Library

[19]

M. Paleczny, C. Vick, and C. Click. The Java HotSpot server compiler. In Proceedings of the Java Virtual Machine Research and Technology Symposium on Java Virtual Machine Research and Technology Symposium - Volume 1, Monterey, California, 2001. USENIX Association.

Digital Library

[20]

M. Pall. LuaJIT 2.0 intellectual property disclosure and research opportunities, June 2009. http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009--11/msg00089.html.

[21]

G. Richards, S. Lebresne, B. Burg, and J. Vitek. An analysis of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs. In PLDI 2010, pages 1--12, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2010. ACM.

Digital Library

[22]

A. Rigo and S. Pedroni. PyPy's approach to virtual machine construction. In DLS, Portland, Oregon, USA, 2006. ACM.

Digital Library

Cited By

Flückiger OJečmen JKrynski SVitek JJhala RDillig I(2022)Deoptless: speculation with dispatched on-stack replacement and specialized continuationsProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523729(749-761)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3519939.3523729
Chen YGuo ZLi RChen SZhou LZhou YZhang X(2021)ForerunnerProceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 28th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles10.1145/3477132.3483564(570-587)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483564
D'Elia DDemetrescu C(2018)On-stack replacement, distilledACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3296979.319239653:4(166-180)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296979.3192396
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The efficient handling of guards in the design of RPython's tracing JIT
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers

Recommendations

Runtime feedback in a meta-tracing JIT for efficient dynamic languages
ICOOOLPS '11: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems

Meta-tracing JIT compilers can be applied to a variety of different languages without explicitly encoding language semantics into the compiler. So far, they lacked a way to give the language implementor control over runtime feedback. This restricted ...
Loop-aware optimizations in PyPy's tracing JIT
DLS '12

One of the nice properties of a tracing just-in-time compiler (JIT) is that many of its optimizations are simple, requiring one forward pass only. This is not true for loop-invariant code motion which is a very important optimization for code with tight ...
Loop-aware optimizations in PyPy's tracing JIT
DLS '12: Proceedings of the 8th symposium on Dynamic languages

One of the nice properties of a tracing just-in-time compiler (JIT) is that many of its optimizations are simple, requiring one forward pass only. This is not true for loop-invariant code motion which is a very important optimization for code with tight ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

VMIL '12: Proceedings of the sixth ACM workshop on Virtual machines and intermediate languages

October 2012

66 pages

ISBN:9781450316330

DOI:10.1145/2414740

Program Chair:
David Grove
IBM Research, USA

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 October 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SPLASH '12

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

SPLASH '12: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 21, 2012

Arizona, Tucson, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 4 of 4 submissions, 100%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

11
Total Citations
View Citations
144
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)8
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Flückiger OJečmen JKrynski SVitek JJhala RDillig I(2022)Deoptless: speculation with dispatched on-stack replacement and specialized continuationsProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523729(749-761)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3519939.3523729
Chen YGuo ZLi RChen SZhou LZhou YZhang X(2021)ForerunnerProceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 28th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles10.1145/3477132.3483564(570-587)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483564
D'Elia DDemetrescu C(2018)On-stack replacement, distilledACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3296979.319239653:4(166-180)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296979.3192396
D'Elia DDemetrescu CFoster JGrossman D(2018)On-stack replacement, distilledProceedings of the 39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3192366.3192396(166-180)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3192366.3192396
Flückiger OScherer GYee MGoel AAhmed AVitek J(2017)Correctness of speculative optimizations with dynamic deoptimizationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31581372:POPL(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3158137
Ilbeyi BBolz-Tereick CBatten C(2017)Cross-layer workload characterization of meta-tracing JIT VMs2017 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC)10.1109/IISWC.2017.8167760(97-107)Online publication date: Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/IISWC.2017.8167760
Vandercammen MDe Roover CHosking ASrisa-an W(2016)Improving trace-based JIT optimisation using whole-program informationProceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages10.1145/2998415.2998418(16-23)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2998415.2998418
D'Elia DDemetrescu CFranke BWu YRastello F(2016)Flexible on-stack replacement in LLVMProceedings of the 2016 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/2854038.2854061(250-260)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2854038.2854061
Duboscq GWürthinger TMössenböck HKolodziej JChilders B(2014)Speculation without regretProceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java platform: Virtual machines, Languages, and Tools10.1145/2647508.2647521(187-193)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2647508.2647521
Duboscq GWürthinger TStadler LWimmer CSimon DMössenböck HBockisch CHaupt MBlackburn SRajan HGil J(2013)An intermediate representation for speculative optimizations in a dynamic compilerProceedings of the 7th ACM workshop on Virtual machines and intermediate languages10.1145/2542142.2542143(1-10)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2542142.2542143
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten