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Cross Module Quickening - The Curious Case of C Extensions

Authors Felix Berlakovich , Stefan Brunthaler

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Author Details

Felix Berlakovich
  • University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Neubiberg, Germany
Stefan Brunthaler
  • University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Neubiberg, Germany

Funding

The research reported in this paper has been funded by the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK), the Federal Ministry for Labour and Economy (BMAW), and the State of Upper Austria in the frame of the COMET Module Dependable Production Environments with Software Security (DEPS) [FFG grant no. 888338] and the SCCH competence center INTEGRATE [FFG grant no. 892418] within the COMET - Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies Programme managed by Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG.

Cite As Get BibTex

Felix Berlakovich and Stefan Brunthaler. Cross Module Quickening - The Curious Case of C Extensions. In 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 313, pp. 6:1-6:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.6

Abstract

Dynamic programming languages such as Python offer expressive power and programmer productivity at the expense of performance. Although the topic of optimizing Python has received considerable attention over the years, a key obstacle remains elusive: C extensions. Time and again, optimized run-time environments, such as JIT compilers and optimizing interpreters, fall short of optimizing across C extensions, as they cannot reason about the native code hiding underneath.
To bridge this gap, we present an analysis of C extensions for Python. The analysis data indicates that C extensions come in different varieties. One such variety is to merely speed up a single thing, such as reading a file and processing it directly in C. Another variety offers broad access through an API, resulting in a domain-specific language realized by function calls.
While the former variety of C extensions offer little optimization potential for optimizing run-times, we find that the latter variety does offer considerable optimization potential. This optimization potential rests on dynamic locality that C extensions cannot readily tap. We introduce a new, interpreter-based optimization leveraging this untapped optimization potential called Cross-Module Quickening. The key idea is that C extensions can use an optimization interface to register highly-optimized operations on C extension-specific datatypes. A quickening interpreter uses these information to continuously specialize programs with C extensions.
To quantify the attainable performance potential of going beyond C extensions, we demonstrate a concrete instantiation of Cross-Module Quickening for the CPython interpreter and the popular NumPy C extension. We evaluate our implementation with the NPBench benchmark suite and report performance improvements by a factor of up to 2.84.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Runtime environments
  • Software and its engineering → Interpreters
Keywords
  • interpreter
  • optimizations
  • C extensions
  • Python

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