research-article

A fast abstract syntax tree interpreter for R

Authors:

Tomas Kalibera,

Floreal Morandat,

Jan VitekAuthors Info & Claims

VEE '14: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments

Pages 89 - 102

https://doi.org/10.1145/2576195.2576205

Published: 01 March 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Dynamic languages have been gaining popularity to the point that their performance is starting to matter. The effort required to develop a production-quality, high-performance runtime is, however, staggering and the expertise required to do so is often out of reach of the community maintaining a particular language. Many domain specific languages remain stuck with naive implementations, as they are easy to write and simple to maintain for domain scientists. In this paper, we try to see how far one can push a naive implementation while remaining portable and not requiring expertise in compilers and runtime systems. We choose the R language, a dynamic language used in statistics, as the target of our experiment and adopt the simplest possible implementation strategy, one based on evaluation of abstract syntax trees. We build our interpreter on top of a Java virtual machine and use only facilities available to all Java programmers. We compare our results to other implementations of R.

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Cited By

Mehta MKrynski SGualandi HThakur MVitek J(2023)Reusing Just-in-Time Compiled CodeProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228397:OOPSLA2(1176-1197)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622839
Larose OKaleba SBurchell HMarr S(2023)AST vs. Bytecode: Interpreters in the Age of Meta-CompilationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228087:OOPSLA2(318-346)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622808
Titzer B(2022)A fast in-place interpreter for WebAssemblyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35633116:OOPSLA2(646-672)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563311
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Index Terms

A fast abstract syntax tree interpreter for R
1. Mathematics of computing
  1. Probability and statistics
    1. Statistical paradigms
      1. Statistical graphics
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Interpreters

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cover image ACM Conferences

VEE '14: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments

March 2014

236 pages

ISBN:9781450327640

DOI:10.1145/2576195

General Chair:
Martin Hirzel
IBM Research
,
Program Chairs:
Erez Petrank
Technion
,
Dan Tsafrir
Technion

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 49, Issue 7
VEE '14
July 2014
222 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2674025
Editors:
Mark W. Bailey
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
,
Rajeev Balasubramonian
University of Utah
,
Al Davis
University of Utah
,
Sarita Adve
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champ
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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Published: 01 March 2014

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VEE '14: 10th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

March 1 - 2, 2014

Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

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VEE '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 18 of 56 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 235 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Mehta MKrynski SGualandi HThakur MVitek J(2023)Reusing Just-in-Time Compiled CodeProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228397:OOPSLA2(1176-1197)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622839
Larose OKaleba SBurchell HMarr S(2023)AST vs. Bytecode: Interpreters in the Age of Meta-CompilationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228087:OOPSLA2(318-346)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622808
Titzer B(2022)A fast in-place interpreter for WebAssemblyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35633116:OOPSLA2(646-672)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563311
Flückiger OChari GYee MJečmen JHain JVitek J(2020)Contextual dispatch for function specializationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282884:OOPSLA(1-24)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428288
Bodin MDiaz TTanter É(2020)A trustworthy mechanized formalization of RACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3393673.327694653:8(13-24)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3393673.3276946
Wu BCampora III JHe YSchlecht AChen S(2019)Generating precise error specifications for C: a zero shot learning approachProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605863:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360586
Mastrangelo LHauswirth MNystrom N(2019)Casting about in the dark: an empirical study of cast operations in Java programsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605843:OOPSLA(1-31)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360584
Benavides ZVora KGupta R(2019)DProf: distributed profiler with strong guaranteesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605823:OOPSLA(1-24)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360582
Marcozzi MTang QDonaldson ACadar C(2019)Compiler fuzzing: how much does it matter?Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605813:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360581
Kaki GPriya SSivaramakrishnan KJagannathan S(2019)Mergeable replicated data typesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605803:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360580
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