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Self thesis: "Adaptive optimization for Self"

Adaptive optimization for Self: Reconciling High Performance with Exploratory Programming

Urs Hölzle

Abstract: Crossing abstraction boundaries often incurs a substantial run-time overhead in the form of frequent procedure calls. Thus, pervasive use of abstraction, while desirable from a design standpoint, may lead to very inefficient programs. Aggressively optimizing compilers can reduce this overhead but conflict with interactive programming environments because they introduce long compilation pauses and often preclude source-level debugging. Thus, programmers are caught on the horns of two dilemmas: they have to choose between abstraction and efficiency, and between responsive programming environments and efficiency. This dissertation shows how to reconcile these seemingly contradictory goals by performing optimizations lazily.

Four new techniques work together to achieve this:

Type feedback achieves high performance by allowing the compiler to inline message sends based on information extracted from the runtime system. On average, programs run 1.5 times faster than the previous Self system; compared to a commercial Smalltalk implementation, two medium-sized benchmarks run about three times faster. This level of performance is obtained with a compiler that is both simpler and faster than previous Self compilers.
Adaptive optimization achieves high responsiveness without sacrificing performance by using a fast compiler to generate initial code while automatically recompiling heavily used program parts with an optimizing compiler. On a previous-generation workstation like the SPARCstation-2, fewer than 200 pauses exceeded 200 ms during a 50- minute interaction, and 21 pauses exceeded one second. On a current-generation workstation, only 13 pauses exceed 400 ms.
Dynamic deoptimization shields the programmer from the complexity of debugging optimized code by transparently recreating non-optimized code as needed. No matter whether a program is optimized or not, it can always be stopped, inspected, and single-stepped. Compared to previous approaches, deoptimization allows more debugging while placing fewer restrictions on the optimizations allowed.
Polymorphic inline caching generates type-case sequences on-the-fly to speed up messages sent from the same call site to several different types of objects. More significantly, they collect concrete type information for the compiler.

With better performance yet good interactive behavior, these techniques reconcile exploratory programming, ubiquitous abstraction, and high performance.

Ph.D. thesis, Computer Science Department, Stanford University. Published as Stanford CSD Technical Report STAN-CS-TR-94-1520 and Sun Microsystems Laboratories TR 95-35.

To get the PostScript file, click here (860K compressed PostScript) or here (700K PDF). For a free printed copy of the SunLabs TR, send e-mail to Amy Tashbook at SunLabs or snail-mail to Editor, Technical Reports, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, 2550 Garcia Avenue, M/S UMTV29-01, Mountain View, CA 94043-1100.