Support Local Variables

Abstract

Ruby is a dynamically typed and object-oriented programming language. Its primary implementation, CRuby, contains a bytecode virtual machine and a mature lazy basic block versioning (LBBV) just-in-time (JIT) compiler called YJIT. In order to both implement more advanced optimizations than YJIT supports and also encourage more outside contributions, we present a new method-based JIT called ZJIT. Like YJIT, ZJIT compiles from bytecode to machine code. Unlike YJIT, ZJIT has multiple global and local optimization passes. ZJIT's high-level intermediate representation is in static single assignment (SSA) form. In order to optimize Ruby's local variables, ZJIT lifts local variables into SSA values. This is a departure from how other Ruby compilers handle locals: other JIT compilers either leave local variables as memory loads and stores or do advanced partial evaluation to recover SSA values from memory. While implementing locals, we (re-)discovered what features make local variables in Ruby especially challenging to compile correctly and efficiently. We demonstrate these features and illustrate how we solved these problems in ZJIT.