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A Lightweight Method for Generating Multi-Tier JIT Compilation Virtual Machine in a Meta-Tracing Compiler Framework

Authors Yusuke Izawa , Hidehiko Masuhara , Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick

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LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.16.pdf
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ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Just-in-time compilers
  • Software and its engineering → Interpreters
Keywords
  • virtual machine
  • JIT compiler
  • multi-tier JIT compiler
  • meta-tracing JIT compiler
  • RPython

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Abstract

Meta-compiler frameworks, such as RPython and Graal/Truffle, generate high-performance virtual machines (VMs) from interpreter definitions. Although they generate VMs with high-quality just-in-time (JIT) compilers, they still lack an important feature that dedicated VMs (i.e., VMs that are developed for specific languages) have, namely multi-tier compilation. Multi-tier compilation uses light-weight compilers at early stages and highly optimizing compilers at later stages in order to balance between compilation overheads and code quality.
We propose a novel approach to enabling multi-tier compilation in the VMs generated by a meta-compiler framework. Instead of extending the JIT compiler backend of the framework, our approach drives an existing (heavyweight) compiler backend in the framework to quickly generate unoptimized native code by merely embedding directives and compile-time operations into interpreter definitions.
As a validation of the approach, we developed 2SOM, a Simple Object Machine with a two-tier JIT compiler based on RPython. 2SOM first applies the tier-1 threaded code generator that is generated by our proposed technique, then, to the loops that exceed a threshold, applies the tier-2 tracing JIT compiler that is generated by the original RPython framework. Our performance evaluation that runs a program with a realistic workload showed that 2SOM improved, when compared against an RPython-based VM, warm-up performance by 15%, with merely a 5% reduction in peak performance.

Cite As Get BibTex

Yusuke Izawa, Hidehiko Masuhara, and Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick. A Lightweight Method for Generating Multi-Tier JIT Compilation Virtual Machine in a Meta-Tracing Compiler Framework. In 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 333, pp. 16:1-16:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.16

Author Details

Yusuke Izawa
  • Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
Hidehiko Masuhara
  • Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan
Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick
  • Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany

Funding

This research was supported by KAKENHI grant nos. 25K21180, 24K23866, 23H03368, and 23K28058, and JST ACT-X grant no. JPMJAX2003.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Stefan Marr for his valuable advice on the measurement methodology and the evaluation results of 2SOM. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped improve this manuscript.

Supplementary Materials

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