ClangJIT: Enhancing C++ with Just-in-Time Compilation

Abstract

The C++ programming language is not only a keystone of the high-performance-computing ecosystem but has proven to be a successful base for portable parallel-programming frameworks. As is well known, C++ programmers use templates to specialize algorithms, thus allowing the compiler to generate highly-efficient code for specific parameters, data structures, and so on. This capability has been limited to those specializations that can be identified when the application is compiled, and in many critical cases, compiling all potentially-relevant specializations is not practical. ClangJIT provides a well-integrated C++ language extension allowing template-based specialization to occur during program execution. This capability has been implemented for use in large-scale applications, and we demonstrate that just-in-time-compilation-based dynamic specialization can be integrated into applications, often requiring minimal changes (or no changes) to the applications themselves, providing significant performance improvements, programmer-productivity improvements, and decreased compilation time.