Ben L. Titzer
ABSTRACT
Intense research on virtual machines has highlighted the need for flexible software architectures that allow quick evaluation of new design and implementation techniques. The interface between the compiler and runtime system is a principal factor in the flexibility of both components and is critical to enabling rapid pursuit of new optimizations and features. Although many virtual machines have demonstrated modularity for many components, significant dependencies often remain between the compiler and the runtime system components such as the object model and memory management system. This paper addresses this challenge with a carefully designed strict compiler-runtime interface and the XIR language. Instead of the compiler backend lowering object operations to machine operations using hard-wired runtime-specific logic, XIR allows the runtime system to implement this logic, simultaneously simplifying and separating the backend from runtime-system details. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of this compiler-runtime interface and the XIR language in the C1X dynamic compiler, a port of the HotSpotTM Client compiler. Our results show a significant reduction in backend complexity with XIR and an overall reduction in the compiler-runtime interface complexity while still generating comparable quality code with only minor impact on compilation time.
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Index Terms
- Improving compiler-runtime separation with XIR
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Reviews
Rafael Corchuelo
Titzer et al. identify that current virtual machines are not modular enough with regard to object models, synchronization mechanisms, and memory management systems, which implies that their runtimes and compilers are too tightly coupled. The conclusion is that it is not easy to evolve them separately, which hinders the work on new code generation techniques and optimizations. The authors propose a set of interfaces and a language called XIR. The interfaces provide a layer of abstraction between runtimes and compilers. In other words, compilers may abstract from the runtime representation of types, classes, methods, and fields; similarly, runtimes may abstract from compilers by means of a number of interfaces that represent intermediate code, exception handler tables, reference maps, and deoptimization information. XIR is an intermediate language that is specifically devised for runtime designers. The authors present a number of experiments that prove that their results do not have a significant impact on compilation times, but do reduce the complexity of the resulting compilers. In summary, this paper is very interesting for researchers who are working on compilers and virtual machines. The authors successfully present their ideas and it is very easy to understand the results. However, it should be noted that, since this is an overview paper, it does not provide too many details. Online Computing Reviews Service
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