Work

Copy-and-Patch Just-in-Time Compiler for R

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Copy-and-patch is a technique for building baseline just-in-time compilers from existing interpreters. It has been successfully applied to languages such as Lua and Python. This paper reports on our experience using this technique to implement a compiler for the R programming language. We describe how this new compiler integrates with the GNU R virtual machine, present the key optimizations we implemented, and evaluate the feasibility of this approach for R. Copy-and-patch also allows extensions such as integration of the feedback recording required by multi-tier compilation. Our evaluation on 57 programs demonstrates very fast compilation times (980 bytecode instructions per millisecond), reasonable performance gains (1.15x–1.91x speedup over GNU R), and manageable implementation complexity.

DOI: 10.1145/3759548.3763370

Authors: Matěj Kocourek, Filip Křikava, Jan Vitek

Institutions: Charles University, Czech Technical University in Prague, Northeastern University

Language: English

Topic: Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Funders: National Science Foundation, Ministerstvo Školství, Mládeže a Tělovýchovy, Grantová Agentura České Republiky

Awards: SHF: Small: Program Analysis for Data Science, CCRI: ENS: Collaborative Research: Enhancing R for Scalability and Deployment, SHF: Small: Predictable Performance for Just-in-Time Compilation, Engineering of Data Analysis Pipelines, Rigorous Engineering of Data Analysis Pipelines (RiGiD)

OpenAlex ID: W4415002400

FWCI: 1.797

Cites: 10

Cited by: 2

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