Implementation of the Programming Language Dino – A Case Study in Dynamic Language Performance Vladimir N. Makarov Red Hat
[email protected] Abstract design of the language, its type system and particular features such The article gives a brief overview of the current state of program- as multithreading, heterogeneous extensible arrays, array slices, ming language Dino in order to see where its stands between other associative tables, first-class functions, pattern-matching, as well dynamic programming languages. Then it describes the current im- as Dino’s unique approach to class inheritance via the ‘use’ class plementation, used tools and major implementation decisions in- composition operator. cluding how to implement a stable, portable and simple JIT com- The second part of the article describes Dino’s implementation. piler. We outline the overall structure of the Dino interpreter and just- We study the effect of major implementation decisions on the in-time compiler (JIT) and the design of the byte code and major performance of Dino on x86-64, AARCH64, and Powerpc64. In optimizations. We also describe implementation details such as brief, the performance of some model benchmark on x86-64 was the garbage collection system, the algorithms underlying Dino’s improved by 3.1 times after moving from a stack based virtual data structures, Dino’s built-in profiling system, and the various machine to a register-transfer architecture, a further 1.5 times by tools and libraries used in the implementation. Our goal is to give adding byte code combining, a further 2.3 times through the use an overview of the major implementation decisions involved in of JIT, and a further 4.4 times by performing type inference with a dynamic language, including how to implement a stable and byte code specialization, with a resulting overall performance im- portable JIT.