An Attempt to Catch Up with JITs: The False Lead of Optimizing Inline Caches

An Attempt to Catch Up with JIT Compilers: The False Lead of Optimizing Inline Caches Aurore Poirier , Erven Rohou , and Manuel Serrano The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, 2025, Vol. 10, Issue 1, Article 6 Submission date: 2024-10-01 Publication date: 2025-02-15 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22152/programming-journal.org/2025/10/6 Full text: PDF Abstract Context: Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers are able to specialize the code they generate according to a continuous profiling of the running programs. This gives them an advantage when compared to Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compilers that must choose the code to generate once for all. Inquiry: Is it possible to improve the performance of AoT compilers by adding Dynamic Binary Modification (DBM) to the executions? Approach: We added to the Hopc AoT JavaScript compiler a new optimization based on DBM to the inline cache (IC), a classical optimization dynamic languages use to implement object property accesses efficiently. Knowledge ... Read full article.