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The Runabout Optimizer

While the Runabout is reasonably fast for most settings, extensive use in the innermost loop of applications can in extreme cases cost up to 40% performance. An example for such an application is a search over a Graph using visitAppropriate to traverse over the nodes. If the per-node operations are extremely cheap, say an identity-test, benchmarks have shown a performance loss of up to 40% (overall) compared to an ordinary visitor.
Another possible problem with the Runabout are settings where the use of reflection and dynamic loading are not permitted by the runtime environment (or at least lead to heavy performance penalties, such as interpretation instead of ahead-of-time compilation). The Runabout Optimizer (short RO) is an attempt to address this issue.
First, please note that the RO should only be used if performance is really an issue, and it is highly advised to do some profiling since some applications may see hardly any improvement or even slight slow-downs. Using the Runabout Optimizer destroys part of the appeal of the Runabout which is that it is very lightweight with respect to integrating it into existing applications since it does not require a different compiler or VM. Also note that the RO is currently still only beta quality. The code that is generated is suboptimal and can in some cases even be a bit slower than the original Runabout (presumably the cost of INVOKEINTERFACE is the primary culprit at this point, but further performance studies are still necessary).
The RO works only with Runabout version 2.x. It does not work with the 5.x version. In order to use it, run
$java -jar ro.jar -dump=OUTPUT-DIRECTORY -library=rt.jar app.jar
    
where ro.jar is a file from the 2.x Runabout distribution, rt.jar contains the JDK classes and app.jar contains the application using the Runabout (and should include the files from runabout.jar). The rewritten classes will be dumped to the specified OUTPUT-DIRECTORY.

Requirements for using the Runabout Optimizer

The RO will not work with applications that use the Runabout APIs addExternalVisit, getAppropriateCode or override getAppropriateCode. The RO (almost) requires whole-world compilation, more specifically, all subclasses of Runabout and all subclasses of all visitees of all Runabouts must be available. Naturally, also all parent classes of these classes are required. Finally, the RO works by adding additional accept and visit methods, as well as instanceof test sequences in various places, so expect your code to grow in size (especially with the current preliminary version that may sometimes generate more code than strictly necessary).
The Runabout Optimizer only works with Runabout of version 2.x.
The runtime of the RO is about 60s for 60.000 lines of code on a P4 with 2.4GHz. Speedups are in the range of up to 50%, but most applications will see much less if any changes (which is why the optimizer only makes sense if you are using the Runabout in a critical section of the application).

Download

The RO is unsupported software. You can find it in an older release of the XTC source tree here.

Contact

The Runabout Optimizer was written by Christian Grothoff.
christian@grothoff.org