Abstract
In widely-used actor-based programming languages, such as Erlang, sequential execution performance is as important as scalability of concurrency. In order to improve sequential performance of Erlang, we develop Pyrlang, an Erlang virtual machine with a just-in-time (JIT) compiler by applying an existing meta-tracing JIT compiler. In this paper, we overview our implementation and present the optimization techniques for Erlang programs, most of which heavily rely on function recursion. Our preliminary evaluation showed approximately 38% speedup over the standard Erlang interpreter.
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Notes
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According to the Computer Language Benchmarks Game (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/), BEAM is slower than C by the factors of 4–95 with 10 benchmark programs.
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Other than BEAM and HiPE, there are a few attempts to support JIT compilation for Erlang, which we discuss in the later section of the paper.
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According to the data from http://speed.pypy.org.
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Huang, R., Masuhara, H., Aotani, T. (2019). Improving Sequential Performance of Erlang Based on a Meta-tracing Just-In-Time Compiler. In: Van Horn, D., Hughes, J. (eds) Trends in Functional Programming. TFP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10447. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14805-8_3
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