An alternative optimization technique for JavaScript engines

ABSTRACT Thread Level Speculation at function level has been suggested as a method to automatically (or semi-automatically) extract parallelism from sequential programs. While there have been multiple implementations in both hardware and software, little work has been done in the context of dynamic programming languages such as JavaScript. In this paper we evaluate the effects of a simple Thread Level Speculation approach, implemented on top of the Rhino1 7R2 JavaScript engine. The evalauation is done using the wellknown JavaScript benchmark suite V8. More specifically, we have measured the effects of our null return value prediction approach for function calls, conflicts with variables in a global scope, and the effects on the execution time. The results show that our strategy to speculate on return values is successful, that conflicts with global variables occur, and for several applications are the execution time improved, while the performance decrease for some applications due to speculation overhead