Graal and truffle: modularity and separation of concerns as cornerstones for building a multipurpose runtime

ABSTRACT

Multi-language runtimes providing simultaneously high performance for several programming languages still remain an illusion. Industrial-strength managed language runtimes are built with a focus on one language (e.g., Java or C#). Other languages may compile to the bytecode formats of those managed language runtimes. However, the performance characteristics of the bytecode generation approach are often lagging behind compared to language runtimes specialized for a specific language. The performance of JavaScript is for example still orders of magnitude better on specialized runtimes (e.g., V8 or SpiderMonkey).

We present a solution to this problem by providing guest languages with a new way of interfacing with the host runtime. The semantics of the guest language is communicated to the host runtime not via generating bytecodes, but via an interpreter written in the host language. This gives guest languages a simple way to express the semantics of their operations including language-specific mechanisms for collecting profiling feedback. The efficient machine code is derived from the interpreter via automatic partial evaluation. The main components reused from the underlying runtime are the compiler and the garbage collector. They are both agnostic to the executed guest languages.

The host compiler derives the optimized machine code for hot parts of the guest language application via partial evaluation of the guest language interpreter. The interpreter definition can guide the host compiler to generate deoptimization points, i.e., exits from the compiled code. This allows guest language operations to use speculations: An operation could for example speculate that the type of an incoming parameter is constant. Furthermore, the guest language interpreter can use global assumptions about the system state that are registered with the compiled code. Finally, part of the interpreter's code can be excluded from the partial evaluation and remain shared across the system. This is useful for avoiding code explosion and appropriate for infrequently executed paths of an operation. These basic mechanisms are provided by the underlying language-agnostic host runtime and allow separation of concerns between guest and host runtime.

Guest language objects are stored on the host heap and managed by the host garbage collector. Multiple executing languages can share the same heap. This enables language interoperability without marshaling at the language boundary, because the field value of one language can point to an object of another language. Reusing the allocation system of the host runtime is another major simplification for guest language runtimes.

We implemented Truffle, the guest language runtime framework, on top of the Graal compiler and the HotSpot(TM) virtual machine. So far, there are prototypes for C, J, Python, JavaScript, R, Ruby, and Smalltalk running on top of the Truffle framework. The prototypes are still incomplete with respect to language semantics. However, most of them can run non-trivial benchmarks to demonstrate the core promise of the Truffle system: Multiple languages within one runtime system at competitive performance.

Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • Compilers

      • Runtime environments