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Efficient interpreter optimizations for the JVM

Authors:

Gülfem Savrun-Yeniçeri,

Stefan Brunthaler,

Michael FranzAuthors Info & Claims

PPPJ '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools

Pages 113 - 123

https://doi.org/10.1145/2500828.2500839

Published: 11 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The Java virtual machine is a popular target for many language implementers. Due to the unusually poor performance of hosted interpreters, many programming language implementers resort to implementing a custom compiler that emits Java bytecode instead. We studied performance of these hosted interpreters targeting the JVM and identified common bottlenecks preventing their efficient execution. First, similar to interpreters written in C/C++, instruction dispatch is expensive on the JVM. Second, Java's array semantics dictate expensive runtime exception checks, which negatively affect array performance essential to interpreters.

We present two optimizations targeting these bottlenecks and show that the performance of the optimized interpreters increases dramatically: we report speedups by a factor of up to 2.45 over the Jython interpreter, and 3.57 over the Rhino interpreter respectively. Furthermore, the performance attained through our optimizations is comparable with custom compiler performance. We provide an easily accessible annotation-based interface to enable our optimizations. Thus, interpreter implementers can expect substantial performance boosts in a matter of hours of implementation effort.

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Cited By

Klimiankou Y(2019)Interpretizer: A Compiler-Independent Conversion of Switch-Based Dispatch into Threaded CodeSoftware Technology: Methods and Tools10.1007/978-3-030-29852-4_4(59-72)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29852-4_4
Rohou ESwamy BSeznec A(2015)Branch prediction and the performance of interpreters — Don't trust folklore2015 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)10.1109/CGO.2015.7054191(103-114)Online publication date: Feb-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/CGO.2015.7054191

Index Terms

Efficient interpreter optimizations for the JVM
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Interpreters
      2. Source code generation

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PPPJ '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools

September 2013

188 pages

ISBN:9781450321112

DOI:10.1145/2500828

General Chair:
Martin Plümicke
Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Walter Binder
University of Lugano, Switzerland

Copyright © 2013 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 the author(s) 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].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 September 2013

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PPPJ '13

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PPPJ '13: virtual machines, languages, and tools

September 11 - 13, 2013

Stuttgart, Germany

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Cited By

Klimiankou Y(2019)Interpretizer: A Compiler-Independent Conversion of Switch-Based Dispatch into Threaded CodeSoftware Technology: Methods and Tools10.1007/978-3-030-29852-4_4(59-72)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29852-4_4
Rohou ESwamy BSeznec A(2015)Branch prediction and the performance of interpreters — Don't trust folklore2015 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)10.1109/CGO.2015.7054191(103-114)Online publication date: Feb-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/CGO.2015.7054191

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