The Structure and Performance of Ecient Interpreters
M. Anton Ertl, David P. Gregg · 2003
Interpreters designed for high general-purpose performance typically perform a large number of indirect branches (3.2%{13% of all executed instructions in our benchmarks). These branches consume more than half of the run-time in a number of congurations we simulated. We evaluate how accurate various existing and proposed branch prediction schemes are on a number of interpreters, how the mispredictions aect the performance of the interpreters and how two dieren t interpreter implementation techniques perform with various branch predictors. We also suggest various ways in which hardware designers, C compiler writers, and interpreter writers can improve the performance of interpreters.