• Paper: TPDE: A Fast Adaptable Compiler Back-End Framework

    From John R Levine@johnl@taugh.com to comp.compilers on Thu May 29 18:07:51 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.compilers

    TPDE is intended to generate JIT code quickly. They try it out as a back
    end to several familiar compilers such as LLVM and find that it generates pretty good code a lot faster than the existing back ends.

    Abstract

    Fast machine code generation is especially important for fast start-up just-in-time compilation, where the compilation time is part of the
    end-to-end latency. However, widely used compiler frameworks like LLVM do
    not prioritize fast compilation and require an extra IR translation step increasing latency even further; and rolling a custom code generator is a substantial engineering effort, especially when targeting multiple architectures.

    Therefore, in this paper, we present TPDE, a compiler back-end framework
    that adapts to existing code representations in SSA form. Using an
    IR-specific adapter providing canonical access to IR data structures and a specification of the IR semantics, the framework performs one analysis
    pass and then performs the compilation in just a single pass, combining instruction selection, register allocation, and instruction encoding. The generated target instructions are primarily derived code written in
    high-level language through LLVM's Machine IR, easing portability to
    different architectures while enabling optimizations during code
    generation.

    To show the generality of our framework, we build a new back-end for LLVM
    from scratch targeting x86-64 and AArch64. Performance results on SPECint
    2017 show that we can compile LLVM-IR 8--24x faster than LLVM -O0 while
    being on-par in terms of run-time performance. We also demonstrate the
    benefits of adapting to domain-specific IRs in JIT contexts, particularly WebAssembly and database query compilation, where avoiding the extra IR translation further reduces compilation latency.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22610

    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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