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Publications in Scientific Journals:

M.A. Ertl, D. Gregg, A. Krall, B. Paysan:
" Vmgen - a generator of efficient virtual machine interpreters";
Software: Practice and Experience, 32 (2002), 3; 265 - 294.



English abstract:
In a virutal machine interpreter, the code for each virutal machines instruction has simlarities to code for other instructions. We present an interpreter generator that takes simple virtual machine instructions descriptions as input and generators C code for processing the instructions in several ways: execution, virtual machine code generation, dissassembly, tracing, and profiling. The generator is designed to support efficient interpreters: it supports threaded code, caching the top-of-stack item in a register, combining simple instructions into superinstructions, and other optimizations. We have used the generator to create interpreters for Forth and Java. The resulting interpreters are faster than other interpreters for the same languaages and they are typically 2-10 times slower than code produced by native-code compilers. We also present results for the effects of the individual optimizations supported by the generator.


Electronic version of the publication:
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/papers/ertl+02.ps.gz


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.