The Structure and Performance of Efficient Interpreters

Interpreters designed for high general-purpose performance typically perform a large number of indirect branches (3.2%–13% of all executed instructions in our benchmarks). These branches consume more than half of the run-time in a number of configurations we simulated. We evaluate how accurate various existing and proposed branch prediction schemes are on a number of interpreters, how the mispredictions affect the performance of the interpreters and how two different interpreter implementation techniques perform with various branch predictors. We also suggest various ways in which hardware designers, C compiler writers, and interpreter writers can improve the performance of interpreters.