StreamJIT: A Commensal Compiler for High-Performance Stream Programming

There are many domain libraries, but despite the perfor-mance benefits of compilation, domain-specific languages are comparatively rare due to the high cost of implementing an optimizing compiler. We propose commensal compilation, a new strategy for compiling embedded domain-specific lan-guages by reusing the massive investment in modern lan-guage virtual machine platforms. Commensal compilers use the host language’s front-end, use host platform APIs that enable back-end optimizations by the host platform JIT, and use an autotuner for optimization selection. The cost of im-plementing a commensal compiler is only the cost of imple-menting the domain-specific optimizations. We demonstrate the concept by implementing a commensal compiler for the stream programming language StreamJIT atop the Java plat-form. Our compiler achieves performance 2.8 times better than the StreamIt native code (via GCC) compiler with con-siderably less implementation effort