A Performant Scheme Interpreter in asm.js

Description

This paper presents the implementation of an efficient interpreter for a Scheme-like language using manually written asm.js code. The asm.js specification defines an optimizable subset of JavaScript which has already served well as a compilation target for web applications where performance is critical. However, its usage as a human-writable language that can be integrated into existing projects to improve performance has remained largely unexplored. We therefore apply this strategy to optimize the implementation of an in- terpreter. We also discuss the feasibility of this approach, as writing asm.js by hand is generally not its recommended use-case. We therefore present a macro system to solve the challenges we encounter. The resulting interpreter is compared to the original C implementation and its compiled equivalent in asm.js. This way, we evaluate whether manual integration with asm.js provides the necessary performance to bring larger applications and runtimes to the web.

Periode	6 apr. 2016
Evenementstitel	31st ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, Programming Languages Track (SAC 2016)
Evenementstype	Conference
Locatie	Pisa, ItalyToon op kaart
Mate van erkenning	International