research-article

A fast abstract syntax tree interpreter for R

Authors:

Tomas Kalibera,

Floreal Morandat,

Jan VitekAuthors Info & Claims

VEE '14: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments

Pages 89 - 102

https://doi.org/10.1145/2576195.2576205

Published: 01 March 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Dynamic languages have been gaining popularity to the point that their performance is starting to matter. The effort required to develop a production-quality, high-performance runtime is, however, staggering and the expertise required to do so is often out of reach of the community maintaining a particular language. Many domain specific languages remain stuck with naive implementations, as they are easy to write and simple to maintain for domain scientists. In this paper, we try to see how far one can push a naive implementation while remaining portable and not requiring expertise in compilers and runtime systems. We choose the R language, a dynamic language used in statistics, as the target of our experiment and adopt the simplest possible implementation strategy, one based on evaluation of abstract syntax trees. We build our interpreter on top of a Java virtual machine and use only facilities available to all Java programmers. We compare our results to other implementations of R.

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Cited By

Kocourek MKřikava FVitek JMarr SAkram SIzawa Y(2025)Copy-and-Patch Just-in-Time Compiler for RProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages10.1145/3759548.3763370(12-21)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3759548.3763370
Mehta MKrynski SGualandi HThakur MVitek J(2023)Reusing Just-in-Time Compiled CodeProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228397:OOPSLA2(1176-1197)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622839
Larose OKaleba SBurchell HMarr S(2023)AST vs. Bytecode: Interpreters in the Age of Meta-CompilationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228087:OOPSLA2(318-346)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622808
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Index Terms

A fast abstract syntax tree interpreter for R
1. Mathematics of computing
  1. Probability and statistics
    1. Statistical paradigms
      1. Statistical graphics
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Interpreters

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