MPLR '25: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

The two main approaches to compile generic programs are dynamic dispatch and monomorphization. While the latter is typically preferred in the context of low latency applications, where the overhead of boxing may be prohibitive, it also comes at the cost of important limitations in terms of modularity, expressiveness, and code size.

The Swift programming language proposes an interesting third alternative that addresses these shortcomings, supporting dynamic dispatch without requiring boxing by factoring method tables out of object headers. This paper examines the merits of that strategy, which we call existentialization, across different programming languages. Our study shows that existentialization can produce code with competitive performance with respect to monomorphization.

GraalVM Native Image is a technology that compiles Java applications to native executables ahead of time (AOT). Due to highly aggressive optimizations, it is possible to reach a peak performance similar to that of a regular Java application executed on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and its Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. The advantage of Native Image is much faster start-up when compared to the JVM and the JIT compiler. However, binary files resulting from Native Image tend to be quite large.

In this work, we present an approach to shrink the executables produced by Native Image while maintaining high peak performance: Instead of compiling everything to machine code, we exclude rarely or never executed methods and keep them as bytecode instead. When called, these methods can be run with a lightweight interpreter. If an interpreted method turns out to cause high overhead, its execution continues in native mode by simulating a JIT compiler. For the DaCapo benchmark suite, we are able to reduce the sizes of Native Image executables by up to 36.9% without significantly reducing peak performance or increasing start-up times.

Self-hosted software language systems need to bootstrap core components such as data structure libraries, parsers, type checkers, or even compilers. Bytecode interpreters can load byte code files, while image-based systems can load in images of entire systems — Emacs, for example, does both. Bootstrapping is more of a problem, however, for traditional AST-based systems, especially when they must be portable across multiple host systems and languages.

In this short paper, we demonstrate how abstract syntax trees can quickly and easily be incorporated into the source code of an embedded interpreter. Our key insight is that a carefully engineered format enables textually identical ASTs to be valid across a wide spectrum of contemporary programming languages. This means languages can be self-hosted with very little bootstrapping infrastructure: only the host interpreter or compiler and a minimal default library, while the rest of the system is imported as ASTs.

This paper outlines our technique, and analyses the engineering design tradeoffs required to make it work in practice. We validate our design by describing our experience supporting the on-going development of GraceKit, which shares a single Grace parser across host language implementations from Java and JavaScript to Haskell and Swift and to Grace itself, and even more eccentric languages like Excel.

With the increasing prevalence of machine learning and large language model (LLM) inference, heterogeneous computing has become essential. Modern JVMs are embracing this transition through projects such as TornadoVM and Babylon, which enable hardware acceleration on diverse hardware resources, including GPUs and FPGAs. However, while performance results are promising, developers currently face a significant tooling gap: traditional profilers excel at CPU-bound execution but become a “black box” when execution transitions to accelerators, providing no visibility into device memory management, execution patterns or cross-device data movement. This gap leaves developers without a unified view of how their Java applications behave across the heterogeneous computing stack. In this paper, we present TornadoViz, a visual analytics tool that leverages TornadoVM’s specialized bytecode system to provide interactive analysis of heterogeneous execution and object lifecycles in managed runtime systems. Unlike existing tools, TornadoViz bridges the managed-native divide by interpreting the bytecode stream that orchestrates heterogeneous execution, hence connecting high-level application logic with low-level hardware utilization patterns. Our tool enables developers to visualize task dependencies, track memory operations across devices, analyze bytecode distribution patterns, and identify performance bottlenecks through interactive dashboards.

Language virtual machines (VMs) for resource-constrained environments enabled the use of managed languages, such as JavaScript or Python, on microcontrollers units (MCUs). WebAssembly (Wasm) has also broadened the range of programming languages on these resource-constrained devices. However, most MCU debugging support targets languages that compile to native code, making them unsuitable for source-level debugging of applications running on managed runtimes. As a result, debugging on MCU VMs is often performed using logging, manual resets, and GPIO toggling for call tracing.

In this work, we propose a language-agnostic approach for debugging MCUs. Our approach builds specialised control-flow graphs (CFGs) to enable language-agnostic debugging from compiler-generated Wasm bytecode and debugging information. During debugging, developers can use traditional debugging operations for which the debugger utilises the specialised CFGs to advance computation. We implemented a CFG debugger prototype for the WARDuino Wasm VM, building on a basic debug API. We show that our debugger successfully targets four languages that compile to Wasm without requiring any modification to the debugger. Our benchmarks reveal that the prototype’s execution speed outperforms WARDuino’s debugger by factors from 7 to 215.

As IoT devices evolve, their microcontroller systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) require higher performance, larger memory, and richer peripherals, resulting in increased power consumption. Integrating low-power (LP) coprocessors into SoCs offers a means to reduce power usage while preserving responsiveness, particularly in sensing tasks. However, LP coprocessors face memory capacity limitations and require complex, platform-specific development. These constraints often necessitate application refactoring and careful coordination of inter-processor communication.

We propose a JIT compilation design for managed languages to enhance the efficiency of LP coprocessor usage. These languages tend to increase code size due to dynamic dispatch and runtime checks. Our key idea is a cooperative approach: the interpreter on the main processor traces the application to compile only type-specialized basic blocks to be executed by the LP coprocessor. By combining trace-based compilation with lazy basic block versioning, the approach minimizes the code footprint and reduces processor interaction.

We implemented a prototype for a subset of the dynamically typed, object-oriented language mruby. We evaluated selected applications using LP coprocessors on ESP32-C6. Our evaluation shows that our design can achieve power savings comparable to handwritten C implementations with at most 6.6 times larger code size.

Using remote memory for the Java heap enables big data analytics frameworks to process large datasets. However, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) runtime struggles to maintain low network traffic during garbage collection (GC) and to reclaim space efficiently. To reduce GC cost in big data analytics, systems group long-lived objects into regions and excludes them from frequent GC scans, regardless of whether the heap resides in local or remote memory. Recent work uses a dual-heap design, placing short-lived objects in a local heap and long-lived objects in a remote region-based heap, limiting GC activity to the local heap. However, these systems avoid scanning by reclaiming remote heap space only when regions are fully garbage, an inefficient strategy that delays reclamation and risks out-of-memory (OOM) errors.

In this paper, we propose SmartSweep, a system that uses approximate liveness information to balance network traffic and space reclamation in remote heaps. SmartSweep adopts a dual-heap design and avoids scanning or compacting objects in the remote heap. Instead, it estimates the amount of garbage in each region without accessing the remote heap and selectively transfers regions with many garbage objects back to the local heap for reclamation. Preliminary results with Spark and Neo4j show that SmartSweep achieves performance comparable to TeraHeap, which reclaims remote objects lazily, while reducing peak remote memory usage by up to 49% and avoiding OOM errors.

Modern web applications integrate JavaScript code with more efficient languages compiling to WebAssembly, such as C, C++ or Rust. However, such multi-language applications challenge program understanding and increase the risk of security attacks. Dynamic taint analysis is a powerful technique used to uncover confidentiality and integrity vulnerabilities. The state of the art has mainly considered taint analysis targeting a single programming language, extended with a limited set of native extensions. To deal with data flows between the language and native extensions, typically taint signatures or models of those extensions have been derived from the extensions’ high-level source code. However, this does not scale for multi-language web applications as the WebAssembly modules evolve continuously and generally do not include their high-level source code.

This paper proposes JASMaint, the first taint analysis approach for multi-language web applications. A novel analysis orchestrator component manages the exchange of taint information during interoperation between our language-specific taint analyses. JASMaint is based on source code instrumentation for both the JavaScript and WebAssembly codebases. This choice enables deployment to all runtimes that support JavaScript and WebAssembly. We evaluate our approach on a benchmark suite of multi-language programs. Our evaluation shows that JASMaint reduces overtainting by 0.003%–56.20% compared to an over-approximating taint analysis based on function models. However, this comes at the cost of an increase in performance overhead by a factor of 1.14x–1.61x relative to the state of the art.

WebAssembly (Wasm) has been extended to support features such as garbage collection, references, exceptions, and tail calls that facilitate compilation of managed languages. In this paper, we capture a snapshot of the performance of languages that use these new capabilities from two perspectives. First, we present a language-by-language performance comparison of six managed language implementations on Wasm to the performance to their native implementations. Second, we focus on the implementation of the Bigloo Scheme compiler and explore the impact of different choices for compiling specific aspects of the language. Our findings suggest that Wasm has become a promising compilation target for most managed languages, but that its performance still falls short of that achieved by native code. Our results also show that the quality of the Wasm implementations vary, with the best ones being, on average, about 1.4× slower than the native backend and the worst ones seeing average slowdowns of more than 8× with some tests even failing to execute correctly.

The increasing prevalence of heterogeneous computing systems, incorporating accelerators like GPUs, has spurred the development of advanced frameworks to bring high performance capabilities to managed languages. TornadoVM is a state-of-the-art, open-source framework for accelerating Java programs. It enables Java applications to offload computation onto GPUs and other accelerators, thereby bridging the gap between the high-level abstractions of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the low-level, performance-oriented world of parallel programming models, such as OpenCL and CUDA. However, this bridging comes with inherent trade-offs. The semantic and operational mismatch between these two worlds - such as managed memory versus explicit memory control, or dynamic JIT compilation versus static kernel generation — forces TornadoVM to limit or exclude support for certain Java features. These limitations can hinder developer productivity and make it difficult to identify and resolve compatibility issues during development.

This paper introduces TornadoInsight, a tool that simplifies development with TornadoVM by detecting incompatible Java constructs through static and dynamic analysis. TornadoInsight is developed as an open-source IntelliJ IDEA plugin that provides immediate, source-linked feedback within the developer's workflow. We present the architecture of TornadoInsight, detail its inspection mechanisms, and evaluate its effectiveness in improving the development workflow for TornadoVM users. TornadoInsight is publicly available and offers a practical solution for enhancing developer experience and productivity in heterogeneous managed runtime environments.

Cross-instruction set architecture (ISA) checkpoint/restoration is becoming increasingly important for live migration in heterogeneous computing environments, where applications need to move seamlessly between ARM, x86, and other processor architectures. While existing approaches either require compilation without Control-flow Integrity (CFI) or suffer from significant performance overhead through interpreter-based execution, this paper presents a novel approach that enables efficient cross-ISA migration using instrumentation during ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation. Our key insight is that on-stack replacement (OSR) enables cross-ISA checkpoint/restoration. OSR is a technique for JIT compilers, and we leverage it to transform between ISA-dependent machine states and ISA-independent WebAssembly states. Our other notable contribution is a technique enabling checkpointing without disabling modern CPU security features such as CFI. We implement the proposed techniques in Wanco, a WebAssembly AOT compiler supporting Linux on ARM-v8 and x86-64 architectures. Our evaluation demonstrates that Wanco achieves efficient cross-ISA migration compared to CRIU, a standard Linux process migration tool. Wanco reduces checkpoint time by 1.0–5.1 times and snapshot size by 1.1–25 times, while incurring an average execution-time overhead of 36 %.