202 research outputs found
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Staged generic programming
Generic programming libraries such as Scrap Your Boilerplate eliminate the need to write repetitive code, but typically introduce significant performance overheads.
This leaves programmers with the regrettable choice between writing succinct but slow programs and writing tedious but efficient programs.
Applying structured multi-stage programming techniques transforms Scrap Your Boilerplate from an inefficient library into a typed optimising code generator, bringing its performance in line with hand-written code, and so combining high-level programming with uncompromised performance.</jats:p
Generalized Points-to Graphs: A New Abstraction of Memory in the Presence of Pointers
Flow- and context-sensitive points-to analysis is difficult to scale; for
top-down approaches, the problem centers on repeated analysis of the same
procedure; for bottom-up approaches, the abstractions used to represent
procedure summaries have not scaled while preserving precision.
We propose a novel abstraction called the Generalized Points-to Graph (GPG)
which views points-to relations as memory updates and generalizes them using
the counts of indirection levels leaving the unknown pointees implicit. This
allows us to construct GPGs as compact representations of bottom-up procedure
summaries in terms of memory updates and control flow between them. Their
compactness is ensured by the following optimizations: strength reduction
reduces the indirection levels, redundancy elimination removes redundant memory
updates and minimizes control flow (without over-approximating data dependence
between memory updates), and call inlining enhances the opportunities of these
optimizations. We devise novel operations and data flow analyses for these
optimizations.
Our quest for scalability of points-to analysis leads to the following
insight: The real killer of scalability in program analysis is not the amount
of data but the amount of control flow that it may be subjected to in search of
precision. The effectiveness of GPGs lies in the fact that they discard as much
control flow as possible without losing precision (i.e., by preserving data
dependence without over-approximation). This is the reason why the GPGs are
very small even for main procedures that contain the effect of the entire
program. This allows our implementation to scale to 158kLoC for C programs
Speculative Staging for Interpreter Optimization
Interpreters have a bad reputation for having lower performance than
just-in-time compilers. We present a new way of building high performance
interpreters that is particularly effective for executing dynamically typed
programming languages. The key idea is to combine speculative staging of
optimized interpreter instructions with a novel technique of incrementally and
iteratively concerting them at run-time.
This paper introduces the concepts behind deriving optimized instructions
from existing interpreter instructions---incrementally peeling off layers of
complexity. When compiling the interpreter, these optimized derivatives will be
compiled along with the original interpreter instructions. Therefore, our
technique is portable by construction since it leverages the existing
compiler's backend. At run-time we use instruction substitution from the
interpreter's original and expensive instructions to optimized instruction
derivatives to speed up execution.
Our technique unites high performance with the simplicity and portability of
interpreters---we report that our optimization makes the CPython interpreter up
to more than four times faster, where our interpreter closes the gap between
and sometimes even outperforms PyPy's just-in-time compiler.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. Uses CPython 3.2.3 and PyPy 1.
Fast and Lean Immutable Multi-Maps on the JVM based on Heterogeneous Hash-Array Mapped Tries
An immutable multi-map is a many-to-many thread-friendly map data structure
with expected fast insert and lookup operations. This data structure is used
for applications processing graphs or many-to-many relations as applied in
static analysis of object-oriented systems. When processing such big data sets
the memory overhead of the data structure encoding itself is a memory usage
bottleneck. Motivated by reuse and type-safety, libraries for Java, Scala and
Clojure typically implement immutable multi-maps by nesting sets as the values
with the keys of a trie map. Like this, based on our measurements the expected
byte overhead for a sparse multi-map per stored entry adds up to around 65B,
which renders it unfeasible to compute with effectively on the JVM.
In this paper we propose a general framework for Hash-Array Mapped Tries on
the JVM which can store type-heterogeneous keys and values: a Heterogeneous
Hash-Array Mapped Trie (HHAMT). Among other applications, this allows for a
highly efficient multi-map encoding by (a) not reserving space for empty value
sets and (b) inlining the values of singleton sets while maintaining a (c)
type-safe API.
We detail the necessary encoding and optimizations to mitigate the overhead
of storing and retrieving heterogeneous data in a hash-trie. Furthermore, we
evaluate HHAMT specifically for the application to multi-maps, comparing them
to state-of-the-art encodings of multi-maps in Java, Scala and Clojure. We
isolate key differences using microbenchmarks and validate the resulting
conclusions on a real world case in static analysis. The new encoding brings
the per key-value storage overhead down to 30B: a 2x improvement. With
additional inlining of primitive values it reaches a 4x improvement
Reify Your Collection Queries for Modularity and Speed!
Modularity and efficiency are often contradicting requirements, such that
programers have to trade one for the other. We analyze this dilemma in the
context of programs operating on collections. Performance-critical code using
collections need often to be hand-optimized, leading to non-modular, brittle,
and redundant code. In principle, this dilemma could be avoided by automatic
collection-specific optimizations, such as fusion of collection traversals,
usage of indexing, or reordering of filters. Unfortunately, it is not obvious
how to encode such optimizations in terms of ordinary collection APIs, because
the program operating on the collections is not reified and hence cannot be
analyzed.
We propose SQuOpt, the Scala Query Optimizer--a deep embedding of the Scala
collections API that allows such analyses and optimizations to be defined and
executed within Scala, without relying on external tools or compiler
extensions. SQuOpt provides the same "look and feel" (syntax and static typing
guarantees) as the standard collections API. We evaluate SQuOpt by
re-implementing several code analyses of the Findbugs tool using SQuOpt, show
average speedups of 12x with a maximum of 12800x and hence demonstrate that
SQuOpt can reconcile modularity and efficiency in real-world applications.Comment: 20 page
Staged Compilation with Two-Level Type Theory
The aim of staged compilation is to enable metaprogramming in a way such that
we have guarantees about the well-formedness of code output, and we can also
mix together object-level and meta-level code in a concise and convenient
manner. In this work, we observe that two-level type theory (2LTT), a system
originally devised for the purpose of developing synthetic homotopy theory,
also serves as a system for staged compilation with dependent types. 2LTT has
numerous good properties for this use case: it has a concise specification,
well-behaved model theory, and it supports a wide range of language features
both at the object and the meta level. First, we give an overview of 2LTT's
features and applications in staging. Then, we present a staging algorithm and
prove its correctness. Our algorithm is "staging-by-evaluation", analogously to
the technique of normalization-by-evaluation, in that staging is given by the
evaluation of 2LTT syntax in a semantic domain. The staging algorithm together
with its correctness constitutes a proof of strong conservativity of 2LLT over
the object theory. To our knowledge, this is the first description of staged
compilation which supports full dependent types and unrestricted staging for
types
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