HiPE on AMD64

Abstract

Erlang is a concurrent functional language designed for developing large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. The primary implementation of the language is the Erlang/OTP system from Ericsson. Even though Erlang/OTP is by default based on a virtual machine interpreter, it nowadays also includes the HiPE (High Performance Erlang) native code compiler as a fully integrated component.This paper describes the recently developed port of HiPE to the AMD64 architecture. We discuss technical issues that had to be addressed when developing the port, decisions we took and why, and report on the speedups (compared with BEAM) which HiPE/AMD64 achieves across a range of Erlang programs and how these compare with speedups for the more mature SPARC and x86 back-ends.