GoingDeep: Inside SPUR - A Trace-Based JIT Compiler for CIL

Computer Scientists and MSR Researchers Wolfram Schulte, Herman Venter, Nikolai Tillmann, and Manuel Fahndrich join Erik Meijer for an Expert to Expert deep dive into the theory and implementation strategies inside of SPUR, a research Tracing Just-In-Time (TJIT) compiler for Microsoft’s Common Intermediate Language CIL (the target language of C#, VB.NET, F#, and many other .NET languages).  

Tracing just-in-time compilers (TJITs) determine frequently executed traces (hot paths and loops) in running programs and focus their optimization effort by emitting optimized machine code specialized to these traces. Prior work has established this strategy to be especially beneficial for dynamic languages such as JavaScript, where the TJIT interfaces with the interpreter and produces machine code from the JavaScript trace. 

In order to validate that the performance gains of a TJIT for interpreted languages like JavaScript do not depend on specific idioms of the language, the SPUR team produces a performance evaluation of a JavaScript runtime that translates JavaScript to CIL and then runs on top of SPUR.

Read the SPUR research paper.