TigerShrimp: An Understandable Tracing JIT Compiler
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Publicerad
2021
Författare
Erlandsson, Jakob
Kärrman, Simon
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
Tracing Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers have been used for compiling programs that
regular compilers struggle with. The difference is clearest in dynamically typed
languages such as JavaScript and Python where very little is know about a program’s
behavior before run-time. During run-time, tracing JIT compilers look for loops in
the code and only compile the most commonly taken path through these loops.
Since compilation is a time consuming process, the idea is to only compile code that
is run frequently enough for it to make up the time it takes to compile it. This
works on the assumption that a program spends most of its execution time inside a
few loops.
Commercial tracing JIT compilers are very complex systems integrating many functionalities
into a highly efficient program. As such, the general ideas behind tracing
JIT compilers can be quite difficult to understand from reading about these compilers.
This project explores the possibility of creating a smaller scale tracing JIT
compiler with the main objective of making it understandable. As far as we know,
this is the first tracing JIT compiler with this stated objective.
Our tracing JIT compiler is designed for understandability meaning much effort
was put into separating the different parts that make up a tracing JIT compiler
into distinct modules, giving a clear overview of the responsibilities of the different
parts and how they interact. Another aspect of understandability is the run-time
visualizing toolkit developed alongside the tracing JIT compiler, this allows for
insight into otherwise unseen functionality of the compiler.
Performance of the compiler is not the main objective of this project, despite this, we
show results highlighting the potential of tracing JIT compilers where our compiler
in some cases outperform the OpenJDK JVM.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
Compiler , JIT , tracing JIT compiler , programming languages , run-time visualization , designed for understandability