NoMap: Speeding-Up JavaScript Using Hardware Transactional Memory

Scripting languages' inferior performance stems from compilers lacking enough static information. To address this limitation, they use JIT compilers organized into multiple tiers, with higher tiers using profiling information to generate high-performance code. Checks are inserted to detect incorrect assumptions and, when a check fails, execution transfers to a lower tier. The points of potential transfer between tiers are called Stack Map Points (SMPs). They require a consistent state in both tiers and, hence, limit code optimization across SMPs in the higher tier.This paper examines the code generated by a state-of-the-art JavaScript compiler and finds that the code has a high frequency of SMPs. These SMPs rarely cause execution to transfer to lower tiers. However, both the optimization-limiting effect of the SMPs, and the overhead of the SMP-guarding checks contribute to scripting languages' low performance. To tackle this problem, we extend the compiler to generate hardware transactions around SMPs, and perform simple within-transaction optimizations enabled by transactions. We target emerging lightweight HTM systems and call our changes NoMap. We evaluate NoMap on the SunSpider and Kraken suites. We find that NoMap lowers the instruction count by an average of 14.2% and 11.5%, and the execution time by an average of 16.7% and 8.9%, for SunSpider and Kraken, respectively.