Building a Basic Just-In-Time Compiler: A Practical Implementation Guide
By
ibobev
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Summary
This technical article explains how to build a basic just-in-time (JIT) compiler from scratch. The author walks through creating a JIT compiler for a simple recurrence relation language, covering key concepts like memory allocation, code generation, and execution. The article demonstrates practical implementation details including memory protection, instruction encoding, and performance comparisons between interpreted and JIT-compiled code. It serves as an educational guide to understanding JIT compilation fundamentals through hands-on examples.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledThe goal is to write a program that reads a recurrence relation definition and, through interpretation, iterates it to some number of terms.
A just-in-time (JIT) compiler is a program that generates machine code at runtime and executes it.
The key insight is that we can allocate memory, write machine code into it, and then execute that code.
The JIT compiler will be much faster than the interpreter because it eliminates the overhead of parsing and interpreting the operations each time.
This is a very basic JIT compiler, but it demonstrates the fundamental concepts that more sophisticated JIT compilers use.
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