2026-08-04T16:12:29Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:10796 2024-03-06T10:46:39Z ddc:004 open_access

Scopes and Frames Improve Meta-Interpreter Specialization Vergu, Vlad Tolmach, Andrew Visser, Eelco Definitional interpreters partial evaluation DynSem is a domain-specific language for concise specification of the dynamic semantics of programming languages, aimed at rapid experimentation and evolution of language designs. To maintain a short definition-to-execution cycle, DynSem specifications are meta-interpreted. Meta-interpretation introduces runtime overhead that is difficult to remove by using interpreter optimization frameworks such as the Truffle/Graal Java tools; previous work has shown order-of-magnitude improvements from applying Truffle/Graal to a meta-interpreter, but this is still far slower than what can be achieved with a language-specific interpreter. In this paper, we show how specifying the meta-interpreter using scope graphs, which encapsulate static name binding and resolution information, produces much better optimization results from Truffle/Graal. Furthermore, we identify that JIT compilation is hindered by large numbers of calls between small polymorphic rules and we introduce rule cloning to derive larger monomorphic rules at run time as a countermeasure. Our contributions improve the performance of DynSem-derived interpreters to within an order of magnitude of a handwritten language-specific interpreter. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Vlad Vergu and Andrew Tolmach and Eelco Visser 2019 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 134, 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.4 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-107969 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.4 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode