Who You Gonna Call: Analyzing the Run-time Call-Site Behavior of Ruby Applications

Sophie Kaleba, Octave Larose, Richard Jones, Stefan Marr

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceedingspeer-review

Abstract

Applications written in dynamic languages are becoming larger and larger and companies increasingly use multi-million line codebases in production. At the same time, dynamic languages rely heavily on dynamic optimizations, particularly those that reduce the overhead of method calls. In this work, we study the call-site behavior of Ruby benchmarks that are being used to guide the development of upcoming Ruby implementations such as TruffleRuby and YJIT. We study the interaction of call-site lookup caches, method splitting, and elimination of duplicate call-targets. We find that these optimizations are indeed highly effective on both smaller and large benchmarks, methods and closures alike, and help to open up opportunities for further optimizations such as inlining. However, we show that TruffleRuby's splitting may be applied too aggressively on already-monomorphic call-sites, coming at a run-time cost. We also find three distinct patterns in the evolution of call-site behavior over time, which may help to guide novel optimizations. We believe that our results may support language implementers in optimizing runtime systems for large codebases built in dynamic languages.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 18th Symposium on Dynamic Languages
EditorsWolfgang De Meuter, Arjun Guha
PublisherACM
Pages14
Number of pages1
ISBN (Electronic)9781450399081
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 07 Dec 2022
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NameDLS
PublisherACM

Fields of science

  • 102 Computer Sciences

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