Chasing JIT Compilers: The False Promise of Optimizing Inline Caches

This paper investigates improving Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compiler performance by adding Dynamic Binary Modification (DBM). Researchers implemented a DBM-based inline cache (IC) optimization in the Hopc AoT JavaScript compiler. However, experiments showed no performance improvement. The study found that reducing memory accesses doesn't always speed up execution on modern architectures, challenging traditional optimization strategies. It concludes that sophisticated compiler optimizations are only worthwhile if the processor can't already accelerate the code, a finding applicable to both AoT and JIT compilers.