Optimizing Constant Value Generation in Just-in-time Compiler for 64-bit JavaScript Engine

Hyung-Kyu Choi, Jehyung Lee

http://doi.org/

JavaScript is widely used in web pages with HTML. Many JavaScript engines adopt Just-in-time compilers to accelerate the execution of JavaScript programs. Recently, many newly introduced devices are adopting 64-bit CPUs instead of 32-bit and Just-in-time compilers for 64-bit CPU are slowly being introduced in JavaScript engines. However, there are many inefficiencies in the currently available Just-in-time compilers for 64-bit devices. Especially, the size of code is significantly increased compared to 32-bit devices, mainly due to 64-bit wide addresses in 64-bit devices. In this paper, we are going to address the inefficiencies introduced by 64-bit wide addresses and values in the Just-in-time compiler for the V8 JavaScript engine and propose more efficient ways of generating constant values and addresses to reduce the size of code. We implemented the proposed optimization in the V8 JavaScript engine and measured the size of code as well as performance improvements with Octane and SunSpider benchmarks. We observed a 3.6% performance gain and 0.7% code size reduction in Octane and a 0.32% performance gain and 2.8% code size reduction in SunSpider.