Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity, what is the rationale for a non-SSA bytecode? Is the idea that each implementation will have a platform-optimized SSA format?

View on HN

SSA tends to result in a larger on-the-wire format since you have more values and phi nodes. Interpretation is slower because you end up with a lot of values unless you do some sort of register allocation, and you have to interpret phi nodes. If and when you need SSA, the dominance frontiers algorithm is fast in practice (as IonMonkey/Crankshaft show).

> the dominance frontiers algorithm

AFAIK V8 does not use dominance frontier based algorithm for SSA construction. It just inserts phis eagerly at loops headers and on forward edges it inserts phis when merge is needed.

While you may be right with regards to the file size (although most SSA-representations are not built for small size, there is quite some potential to reduce it, imho), you'll have to do register allocation/spilling/etc. in your VM/compiler anyway and that is easier and faster on SSA[1, and more]. The dominance frontiers algorithm is actually not that good imho, there are better options[2], especially considering that one may not want to construct an unnecessary dominance tree in an Interpreter/VM. Now, I have no experience how much overhead SSA-deconstruction inflicts when lowering to machine code.

[1] http://www.cdl.uni-saarland.de/projects/ssara/ [2] http://www.cdl.uni-saarland.de/projects/ssaconstr/

Yes, I'm associated with that group.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com