Paper: TPDE: A Fast Adaptable Compiler Back-End Framework

TPDE is intended to generate JIT code quickly. They try it out as a back
end to several familiar compilers such as LLVM and find that it generates
pretty good code a lot faster than the existing back ends.


Abstract


Fast machine code generation is especially important for fast start-up
just-in-time compilation, where the compilation time is part of the
end-to-end latency. However, widely used compiler frameworks like LLVM do
not prioritize fast compilation and require an extra IR translation step
increasing latency even further; and rolling a custom code generator is a
substantial engineering effort, especially when targeting multiple
architectures.


Therefore, in this paper, we present TPDE, a compiler back-end framework
that adapts to existing code representations in SSA form. Using an
IR-specific adapter providing canonical access to IR data structures and a
specification of the IR semantics, the framework performs one analysis
pass and then performs the compilation in just a single pass, combining
instruction selection, register allocation, and instruction encoding. The
generated target instructions are primarily derived code written in
high-level language through LLVM's Machine IR, easing portability to
different architectures while enabling optimizations during code
generation.


To show the generality of our framework, we build a new back-end for LLVM
from scratch targeting x86-64 and AArch64. Performance results on SPECint
2017 show that we can compile LLVM-IR 8--24x faster than LLVM -O0 while
being on-par in terms of run-time performance. We also demonstrate the
benefits of adapting to domain-specific IRs in JIT contexts, particularly
WebAssembly and database query compilation, where avoiding the extra IR
translation further reduces compilation latency.


https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22610


Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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