Automatic, Template-Based Run-Time Specialization: Implementation and Experimental Study

: Specializing programs with respect to run-time values is an optimization strategy that has been shown to drastically improve code performance on realistic programs ranging from operating systems to graphics. Recently, various approaches to specializing code at run-time have been proposed. However, these approaches still suffer from shortcomings that limit their applicability: they are either manual, require programs to be written in a dedicated language, or are too expensive to be widely applied. We solve these problems by introducing new techniques to implement run-time specialization. The key to our approach is the use of code templates. Templates are automatically generated from ordinary programs. These templates are compiled and optimized before run time, thus minimizing the time to generate code at run time. Because templates can be compiled by an optimizing compiler, the code generated is of high quality. Experimental results obtained on scientific and graphics code indicate th..