A geometric constraint over k-dimensional objects and shapes subject to business rules

This report presents a global constraint that enforces rules written in a language based on arithmetic and first-order logic to hold among a set of objects. In a first step, the rules are rewritten to Quantifier-Free Presburger Arithmetic (QFPA) formulas. Secondly, such formulas are compiled to generators of k-dimensional forbidden sets. Such generators are a generalization of the indexicals of cc(FD). Finally, the forbidden sets generated by such indexicals are aggregated by a sweep-based algorithm and used for filtering. The business rules allow to express a great variety of packing and placement constraints, while admitting efficient and effective filtering of the domain variables of the k-dimensional object, without the need to use spatial data structures. The constraint was used to directly encode the packing knowledge of a major car manufacturer and tested on a set of real packing problems under these rules, as well as on a packing-unpacking problem

Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning

Dynamically typed programming languages such as JavaScript and Python defer type checking to run time. In order to maximize performance, dynamic language VM implementations must attempt to eliminate redundant dynamic type checks. However, type inference analyses are often costly and involve tradeoffs between compilation time and resulting precision. This has lead to the creation of increasingly complex multi-tiered VM architectures. This paper introduces lazy basic block versioning, a simple JIT compilation technique which effectively removes redundant type checks from critical code paths. This novel approach lazily generates type-specialized versions of basic blocks on-the-fly while propagating context-dependent type information. This does not require the use of costly program analyses, is not restricted by the precision limitations of traditional type analyses and avoids the implementation complexity of speculative optimization techniques. We have implemented intraprocedural lazy basic block versioning in a JavaScript JIT compiler. This approach is compared with a classical flow-based type analysis. Lazy basic block versioning performs as well or better on all benchmarks. On average, 71% of type tests are eliminated, yielding speedups of up to 50%. We also show that our implementation generates more efficient machine code than TraceMonkey, a tracing JIT compiler for JavaScript, on several benchmarks. The combination of implementation simplicity, low algorithmic complexity and good run time performance makes basic block versioning attractive for baseline JIT compilers