Efficient compilation of Lua for the CLR

ABSTRACT

Microsoft's Common Language Runtime offers a target environment for compiler writers that provides a managed execution environment and type system, garbage collection, access to OS services, multithreading, and a Just-In-Time compiler. But the CLR uses a statically typed intermediate language, which is a problem for efficient compilation of dynamically typed languages in general, and the Lua language in particular.

This paper presents a way to implement a Lua compiler for the CLR that generates efficient code. The code this compiler generates outperforms the same code executed by the Lua interpreter and similar code generated by Microsoft's IronPython compiler. It approaches the performance of Lua code compiled to native code by LuaJIT.

REFERENCES

• 1: A. L. de Moura, N. Rodriguez, and R. Ierusalimschy. Coroutines in lua. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 10(7):910--925, 2004.
• 2: M. Hammond. Python for .NET: Lessons Learned, 2000. Technical report by ActiveState, not available online at the time of this paper's writing.
• 3: Urs Hölzle , David Ungar, Optimizing dynamically-dispatched calls with run-time type feedback, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1994 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.326-336, June 20-24, 1994, Orlando, Florida, United States
• 4: J. Hugunin. Ironpython: A fast python implementation for .net and mono. In Proceedings of PyCon DC 2004, 2004. Available at http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/9.
• 5: J. Hugunin. A Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), 2007. Available at http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2007/04/30/a-dynamic-language-runtime-dlr.aspx.
• 6: Roberto Ierusalimschy , Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo , Waldemar Celes, The evolution of Lua, Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages, p.2-1-2-26, June 09-10, 2007, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/1238844.1238846]
• 7: R. Ierusalimschy, L. H. Figueiredo, and W. Celes. Lua 5.1 Reference Manual. Technical Report 14/03, PUC-Rio, 2006. Available at http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1.
• 8: F. Mascarenhas and R. Ierusalimschy. Luainterface: Scripting the .net clr with lua. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 10(7):892--909, 2004.
• 9: F. Mascarenhas and R. Ierusalimschy. Running lua scripts on the clr through bytecode translation. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 11(7):1275--1290, 2005.
• 10: Microsoft. ECMA C# and Common Language Infrastructure Standards, 2005. Available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/.
• 11: M. Pall. The LuaJIT project, 2007. Available at http://luajit.org/.
• 12: Greg Pettyjohn , John Clements , Joe Marshall , Shriram Krishnamurthi , Matthias Felleisen, Continuations from generalized stack inspection, Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, September 26-28, 2005, Tallinn, Estonia

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

Keywords:
clr, compilers, dynamic languages, lua