Ahead-of-time compilation in OMR: overview and first steps

The growth of dynamic programming languages has triggered a renewed interest in ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation technology. While there are available resources describing technical details, possible implementations or performance comparisons of various AOT implementations, a limited number of publications are available providing sufficient background information to enter the field or the structural requirements to an AOT infrastructure. It is responsible for producing, storing and reusing the compiled code. Eclipse OpenJ9 implements all of the necessary modules for AOT. This paper describes the implementation of an ahead-of-time compiler in OpenJ9 and attempts to draw parallels with textbook descriptions of an ahead-of-time compiler. The paper also outlines initial steps and challenges of implementing AOT for language agnostic runtime environments, using Eclipse OMR as an example.