Static and dynamic program compilation by interpreter specialization

Interpretation and run-time compilation techniques are increasingly important because they can support heterogeneous architectures, evolving programming languages, and dynamically-loaded code. Interpretation is simple to implement, but yields poor performance. Run-time compilation yields better perf...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation 2000-09, Vol.13 (3), p.161-178
Main Authors: THIBAULT, Scott, CONSEL, Charles, LAWALL, Julia L, MARLET, Renaud, MULLER, Gilles
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Automata. Abstract machines. Turing machines
Computer Science
Computer science
control theory
systems
Exact sciences and technology
Language theory and syntactical analysis
Programming languages
Programming theory
Software
Software Engineering
Theoretical computing
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Summary:Interpretation and run-time compilation techniques are increasingly important because they can support heterogeneous architectures, evolving programming languages, and dynamically-loaded code. Interpretation is simple to implement, but yields poor performance. Run-time compilation yields better performance, but is costly to implement. One way to preserve simplicity but obtain good performance is to apply program specialization to an interpreter in order to generate an efficient implementation of the program automatically. Such specialization can be carried out at both compile time and run time. Recent advances in program-specialization technology have significantly improved the performance of specialized interpreters. This paper presents and assesses experiments applying program specialization to both bytecode and structured-language interpreters. The results show that for some general-purpose bytecode languages, specialization of an interpreter can yield speedups of up to a factor of four, while specializing certain structured-language interpreters can yield performance comparable to that of an implementation in a general-purpose language, compiled using an optimizing compiler.
ISSN:1388-3690
2212-0793
1573-0557
DOI:10.1023/A:1010078412711