One VM to rule them all

Würthinger, Thomas; Wimmer, Christian; Wöß, Andreas; Mössenböck, Hanspeter; Duboscq, Gilles; Humer, Christian; Richards, Gregor; Simon, Doug; Wolczko, Mario

doi:10.1145/2509578.2509581

Cited by 242 publications

(133 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…In combination with the Graal JIT compiler [24], selfoptimizing interpreters can reach performance of the same order of magnitude as Java on top of HotSpot [13]. To reach this performance, Truffle applies partial evaluation on the specialized ASTs to determine the compilation unit that corresponds to a relevant part of a guest-language's program, which is then optimized and compiled to native code by Graal using classic compiler optimizations, inlining, and escape analysis.…”

Section: Truffle and Graalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building efficient and highly run-time adaptable virtual machines

Chari

Garbervetsky

Marr³

2016

Proceedings of the 12th Symposium on Dynamic Languages

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Programming language virtual machines (VMs) realize language semantics, enforce security properties, and execute applications efficiently. Fully Reflective Execution Environments (EEs) are VMs that additionally expose their whole structure and behavior to applications. This enables developers to observe and adapt VMs at run time. However, there is a belief that reflective EEs are not viable for practical usages because such flexibility would incur a high performance overhead.To refute this belief, we built a reflective EE on top of a highly optimizing dynamic compiler. We introduced a new optimization model that, based on the conjecture that variability of low-level (EE-level) reflective behavior is low in many scenarios, mitigates the most significant sources of the performance overheads related to the reflective capabilities in the EE. Our experiments indicate that reflective EEs can reach peak performance in the order of standard VMs. Concretely, that a) if reflective mechanisms are not used the execution overhead is negligible compared to standard VMs, b) VM operations can be redefined at language-level without incurring in significant overheads, c) for several software adaptation tasks, applying the reflection at the VM level is not only lightweight in terms of engineering effort, but also competitive in terms of performance in comparison to other ad-hoc solutions.

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Section: Truffle and Graalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building efficient and highly run-time adaptable virtual machines

Chari

Garbervetsky

Marr³

2016

Proceedings of the 12th Symposium on Dynamic Languages

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“…It is based on the notion of self-optimizing AST interpreters that can be compiled to highly-optimized machine code by the Graal compiler [34], which uses partial evaluation. Language implementations using Truffle include JavaScript, R, Smalltalk, and Ruby [26].…”

Section: The Truffle Object Storage Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient and thread-safe objects for dynamically-typed languages

DalozeBenoit¹,

MarrStefan²,

BonettaDaniele³

et al. 2016

SIGPLAN Not.

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We are in the multi-core era. Dynamically-typed languages are in widespread use, but their support for multithreading still lags behind. One of the reasons is that the sophisticated techniques they use to efficiently represent their dynamic object models are often unsafe in multithreaded environments. This paper defines safety requirements for dynamic object models in multithreaded environments. Based on these requirements, a language-agnostic and thread-safe object model is designed that maintains the efficiency of sequential approaches. This is achieved by ensuring that field reads do not require synchronization and field updates only need to synchronize on objects shared between threads. Basing our work on JRuby+Truffle, we show that our safe object model has zero overhead on peak performance for thread-local objects and only 3% average overhead on parallel benchmarks where field updates require synchronization. Thus, it can be a foundation for safe and efficient multithreaded VMs for a wide range of dynamic languages.

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“…Truffle [45,46] is a platform for building high-performance language implementations. A Truffle language implementation is an AST interpreter, where the source code of the guest language is compiled to an AST that can then be executed.…”

Section: Truffle and Graalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory-safe Execution of C on a Java VM

Grimmer

Schatz²,

Seaton

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security

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In low-level languages such as C, spatial and temporal safety errors (e.g. buffer overflows or dangling pointer dereferences) are hard to find and can cause security vulnerabilities. Modern high-level languages such as Java avoid these problems by running programs on a virtual machine that provides automated memory management.In this paper we show how we can safely execute C code on top of a modern runtime (e.g., a Java Virtual Machine) by allocating all data on the managed heap. We reuse the memory management of the runtime, hence, we can ensure spatial and temporal safety with little effort. Nevertheless, we retain all characteristics that are typical for unsafe languages (such as pointer arithmetic, pointers into objects, or arbitrary type casts). We discuss how our approach complies with the C99 standard.Compared to an optimized unsafe execution of a C program (compiled with the GNU C compiler and all optimizations enabled) our approach has overhead of 15% on average (peak-performance).

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One VM to rule them all

Cited by 242 publications

References 55 publications

Building efficient and highly run-time adaptable virtual machines

Building efficient and highly run-time adaptable virtual machines

Efficient and thread-safe objects for dynamically-typed languages

Memory-safe Execution of C on a Java VM

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