Just-in-time compilation
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- See also Just in time for the business technique
In computing, just-in-time compilation (JIT), also known as dynamic translation, is a technique for improving the performance of interpreted programs.
Typical compilers examine the source code for a program and produce a machine-readable executable program. This style of compiler is almost universal due to its performance, but is limited in that the executable can only be run on the single platform it was compiled for. Although in theory a different compiler on another platform could be used on the same source code, in practice this tends to be very difficult to achieve due to differences in compilers. Thus the vast majority of programs are limited to a single system.
Another solution is the interpreter, which examines the source code on whatever platform it finds itself on. As long as an interpreter exists for a platform, the program should be able to run on it. On the downside, interpreters tend to be quite slow, and are not widely used as a result.
Interpreters typically use an intermediate code, such as p-code or bytecode, where the source code is compiled half-way before run time, and later, at run time, it is interpreted from there. Such systems have been in use for many years, but generally the performance has not been enough to make it a serious competitor. In more recent years the performance of computers has become so great that such approaches now seem practical.
The basic idea behind a JIT is that the bytecode is smaller and easier to compile than the original source code, so that the time spent compiling it the "rest of the way" on any particular platform is quite small. In theory this means that the JIT system has the best of both worlds, it can run just as fast as other compiled code, yet the compiler for any particular platform is easy to write because the main bytecode compiler has already done most of the work.
Dynamic translation was pioneered by the commercial Smalltalk implementation currently known as VisualWorks, in the early 1980s. Currently it is also used by some implementations of the Java virtual machine under the name JIT (Just In Time compilation). Speed was poor however, so newer runtime systems were introduced that compiled the bytecode as it was run.
Sun's HotSpot compiler was the first high-performance Java JIT to appear, around 1997. Since then almost all Java systems have introduced a JIT, and the technique has since become popular for other uses as well. Microsoft selected a JIT-based system for their .NET environment, and the Crusoe processor uses similar techniques in hardware.
Psyco is a JIT compiler for Python.
Related topics
References
- L. Peter Deutsch and Allan M. Schiffman, "Efficient Implementation of the Smalltalk-80 System", 11th Annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Jan 1984, pp. 297-302
- Free Online Dictionary of Computing
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