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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.20

Taking a Closer Look: An Outlier-Driven Approach to Compilation-Time Optimization

Authors: Florian Huemer, David Leopoldseder, Aleksandar Prokopec, Raphael Mosaner, and Hanspeter Mössenböck

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 313, 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024)

Abstract

Improving compilation time in optimizing compilers is challenging due to their large number of interconnected components. This includes compiler optimizations, compiler tiers, heuristics, and profiling information. Despite this complexity, research in compilation-time optimization is often guided by analyzing metrics of entire program runs, such as the total compilation time and overall memory footprint. This coarse-grained perspective hides relevant information, such as source program functions for which the compiler allocates a lot of memory or compiler optimizations with a high impact on the total compilation time. This leaves high-level metrics as the only reference point for driving optimization design. Consequently, compilation-time regressions in one program function that are obscured by improvements in other functions stay undetected, while the impacts of compiler changes on untouched parts of the compiler are mainly unknown. Furthermore, developers overlook long-standing compiler defects because their high-level metrics do not change over time. To address these limitations, we propose ICON, a new data-driven approach to compilation-time optimization that breaks up high-level metrics into individual source program functions, compiler optimizations, or even into individual instructions in the compiler source code. Our methodology enables an iterative in-depth compilation-time analysis, focusing on outliers to identify optimization opportunities. We show that outliers, both in terms of time spent in a particular compiler optimization, and in terms of individual compilations that take substantially longer, can reveal potential problems in the compiler implementation. We applied our approach to GraalVM and extracted data for multiple of its language runtimes. We analyzed the resulting data, present the first detailed look into the distribution of compilation time in the GraalVM compiler, a state-of-the-art multi-language compiler, and identified defects that led to regressions in overall compilation time or the compilation time of specific languages. We furthermore designed two optimizations based on the identified outliers that improve compilation time between 2.25% and 9.45%. We believe that our approach can guide compiler developers in finding usually overlooked optimization potential and defects, and focus future research efforts in making compilers more efficient.

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Florian Huemer, David Leopoldseder, Aleksandar Prokopec, Raphael Mosaner, and Hanspeter Mössenböck. Taking a Closer Look: An Outlier-Driven Approach to Compilation-Time Optimization. In 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 313, pp. 20:1-20:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{huemer_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.20,
  author =	{Huemer, Florian and Leopoldseder, David and Prokopec, Aleksandar and Mosaner, Raphael and M\"{o}ssenb\"{o}ck, Hanspeter},
  title =	{{Taking a Closer Look: An Outlier-Driven Approach to Compilation-Time Optimization}},
  booktitle =	{38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024)},
  pages =	{20:1--20:28},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-341-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{313},
  editor =	{Aldrich, Jonathan and Salvaneschi, Guido},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.20},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-208693},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.20},
  annote =	{Keywords: Compilation time, outliers, dynamic languages, virtual machines, GraalVM, ICON}
}

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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.3

Theory and Practice of Coroutines with Snapshots

Authors: Aleksandar Prokopec and Fengyun Liu

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 109, 32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2018)

Abstract

While event-driven programming is a widespread model for asynchronous computing, its inherent control flow fragmentation makes event-driven programs notoriously difficult to understand and maintain. Coroutines are a general control flow construct that can eliminate control flow fragmentation. However, coroutines are still missing in many popular languages. This gap is partly caused by the difficulties of supporting suspendable computations in the language runtime. We introduce first-class, type-safe, stackful coroutines with snapshots, which unify many variants of suspendable computing. Our design relies solely on the static metaprogramming support of the host language, without modifying the language implementation or the runtime. We also develop a formal model for type-safe, stackful and delimited coroutines, and we prove the respective safety properties. We show that the model is sufficiently general to express iterators, single-assignment variables, async-await, actors, event streams, backtracking, symmetric coroutines and continuations. Performance evaluations reveal that the proposed metaprogramming-based approach has a decent performance, with workload-dependent overheads of 1.03-2.11 x compared to equivalent manually written code, and improvements of up to 6 x compared to other approaches.

Cite as

Aleksandar Prokopec and Fengyun Liu. Theory and Practice of Coroutines with Snapshots. In 32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 109, pp. 3:1-3:32, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018)

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@InProceedings{prokopec_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.3,
  author =	{Prokopec, Aleksandar and Liu, Fengyun},
  title =	{{Theory and Practice of Coroutines with Snapshots}},
  booktitle =	{32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2018)},
  pages =	{3:1--3:32},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-079-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2018},
  volume =	{109},
  editor =	{Millstein, Todd},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.3},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-92087},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.3},
  annote =	{Keywords: coroutines, continuations, coroutine snapshots, asynchronous programming, inversion of control, event-driven programming}
}

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Taking a Closer Look: An Outlier-Driven Approach to Compilation-Time Optimization

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Theory and Practice of Coroutines with Snapshots

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