Dynamically-typed languages rely on just-in-time (JIT) compilation for execution performance. Meta-compilation systems such as GraalVM’s Truffle language implementation framework have reduced the effort needed of enabling JIT compilation to implementing an interpreter. But dynamic languages are increasingly used in scenarios where ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation would be preferable, for instance, for faster startup or to avoid the memory cost of JIT compilation. Therefore, we plan to extend meta-compilation systems to also support AOT compilation.

For successful AOT compilation of dynamically-typed languages, we need an extensive and robust type analysis. In this position paper, we present first ideas for a framework with an extensible core analysis that will enable us to extract type flow semantics from an interpreter implemented in a meta-compilation system.

To achieve the precision needed for fast machine code, we will need to include heuristic analyses. For this, we envision a plugin system that allows us to integrate various different heuristics into a singular unified analysis. Combining analyses in this way can produce results that are better than the sum of their parts.

While this is a very ambitious goal, given the complexity of compiling dynamic languages, we believe we can achieve better-than-interpreted performance for programs with reasonable behavior. Furthermore, to support the full language semantics we keep a general interpreter as a fallback.