Routine Run-time Code Generation

Run-time code generation (RTCG) would be used routinely if application programmers had a facility with which they could easily create their own run-time code generators, because it would offer benefits both in terms of the efficiency of the code that programmers would produce and the ease of producing it. Such a facility would necessarily have the following properties: it would not require that programmers know assembly language; programmers would have full control over the generated code; the code generator would operate entirely at the binary level. In this paper, we offer arguments and examples supporting these assertions. We briefly describe Jumbo, a system we have built for producing run-time code generators for Java.