Which Interpreters Are Faster, AST or Bytecode?

Re:Which Interpreters Are Faster, AST or Bytecode? by smarr on Saturday October 21, 2023 @11:59AM (#37967914)

Please see Figure 2 in the blog post https://stefan-marr.de/2023/10/ast-vs-bytecode-interpreters/... or Sec. 5.2 in the paper https://stefan-marr.de/papers/oopsla-larose-et-al-ast-vs-byt...

We report on results for both, with and without just-in-time compilation. The specific focus for this work was pure interpreter performance in the context of metacompilation systems, but before compilation had a chance to kick in.

For both RPython and Truffle/Graal, it's possible to disable the JIT compilers and measure pure interpreter speed.

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Re:Which Interpreters Are Faster, AST or Bytecode? by tomp on Saturday October 21, 2023 @06:53PM (#37971231)

Thanks for the clarification!

So the "baseline" is Java - is that Java compiled or interpreted? And if the latter, is the non-JIT-ted Graal interpreter compiled (as Java) and interpreting the script, or is it interpreted itself?

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Re:Which Interpreters Are Faster, AST or Bytecode? by smarr on Sunday October 22, 2023 @06:21PM (#37979610)

> is that Java compiled or interpreted?

The figure for the JIT-compiled numbers uses a standard HotSpot JVM, with JIT compilation. The figures for the interpreter numbers uses a standard HotSpot JVM with the -Xint flag, so, only using the Java bytecode interpreter.

The TruffleSOM interpreter is AOT-compiled, so, it's a native binary, which is then interpreting the SOM code.

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