Embedded platforms are resource-constrained systems in which performance and memory requirements of executed code are of critical importance. However, standard techniques such as full just-in-time(JIT) compilation and/or adaptive optimization (AO) may not be appropriate for this type of systems due to memory and compilation overheads. The research presented in this paper proposes a technique that combines some of the main benefits of JIT compilation, superoperators(SOs) and profile-guided optimization, in order to deliver a lightweight Java bytecode compilation system, targeted for resource-constrained environments, that achieves runtime performance similar to that of state-of-the-art JIT/AO systems, while having a minimal impact on runtime memory consumption. The key ideas are to use profiler-selected, extended bytecode basic blocks as superoperators (new bytecode instructions) and to perform few, but very targeted, JIT/AO-like optimizations at compile time only on the superoperators...
Carmen Badea, Alexandru Nicolau, Alexander V. Veid