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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.3

Pydrofoil: Accelerating Sail-Based Instruction Set Simulators

Authors: Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick, Luke Panayi, Ferdia McKeogh, Tom Spink, and Martin Berger

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 333, 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)

Abstract

We present Pydrofoil, a multi-stage compiler that generates instruction set simulators (ISSs) from processor instruction set architectures (ISAs) expressed in the high-level, verification-oriented ISA specification language Sail. Pydrofoil achieves a > 230× speedup over the C-based ISS generated by Sail on our benchmarks, thanks to the following insights. (i) An ISS is effectively an interpreter loop, and tracing just-in-time (JIT) compilers have proven effective at accelerating those, albeit mostly for dynamically typed languages. (ii) ISS workloads are highly atypical, dominated by intensive bit manipulation operations. Conventional compiler optimisations for general-purpose programming languages have limited impact for speeding up such workloads. We develop suitable domain-specific optimisations. (iii) Neither tracing JIT compilers, nor ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation alone, even with domain-specific optimisations, suffice for the generation of performant ISSs. Pydrofoil therefore implements a hybrid approach, pairing an AOT compiler with a tracing JIT built on the meta-tracing PyPy framework. AOT and JIT use domain-specific optimisations. Our benchmarks demonstrate that combining AOT and JIT compilers provides significantly greater performance gains than using either compiler alone.

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Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick, Luke Panayi, Ferdia McKeogh, Tom Spink, and Martin Berger. Pydrofoil: Accelerating Sail-Based Instruction Set Simulators. In 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 333, pp. 3:1-3:31, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{bolztereick_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.3,
  author =	{Bolz-Tereick, Carl Friedrich and Panayi, Luke and McKeogh, Ferdia and Spink, Tom and Berger, Martin},
  title =	{{Pydrofoil: Accelerating Sail-Based Instruction Set Simulators}},
  booktitle =	{39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)},
  pages =	{3:1--3:31},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-373-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{333},
  editor =	{Aldrich, Jonathan and Silva, Alexandra},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.3},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-232962},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.3},
  annote =	{Keywords: Instruction set architecture, processor, domain-specific language, just-in-time compilation, meta-tracing}
}

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Pydrofoil: Accelerating Sail-Based Instruction Set Simulators

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