#naive

MEP-42 Phase 1: Naive Backend Recommendation

§1 Provenance This is a synthesis document. Sources are the eight technique deep-dives in naive/01_*.md through naive/08_*.md and the six paper surveys in papers/01_*.md through papers/06_*.md . Project context: MEP-40 specification of vm3 + compiler3, the Cell/arena/three-bank-register-file design, and the project preference to stay pure-Go-no-cgo. §2 Recommendation Mochi MEP-42 phase 1 should ship a copy-and-patch JIT. Hand-write one C function per runtime/vm3/op.go opcode, compile each with Clang at build time,...

QBE as a Naive-But-Good-Enough Backend

§1 Provenance Author: Quentin Carbonneaux (Yale), with contributions for arm64 and riscv64 by additional collaborators. Canonical site: https://c9x.me/compile/ . Source mirror: https://github.com/8l/qbe . License: MIT. FOSDEM 2022 introduction by Drew DeVault (SourceHut): https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lg_qbe/attachments/slides/4878/ . Notes by Bill Mill: https://notes.billmill.org/programming/compilers/QBE.html . Go wrapper (cgo-free): modernc.org/libqbe ( https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/libqbe) , a port of QBE to Go. §2 Technique / contribution QBE's value proposition: take an SSA IR in a simple textual form, run...

chibicc: A Minimal C Compiler as a Mochi Backend Reference

§1 Provenance Author: Rui Ueyama (Google, prior author of 8cc and the current LLVM lld linker). Repository: https://github.com/rui314/chibicc . Companion book: "Compiler Book" (Japanese), https://www.sigbus.info/compilerbook (English translation pending). License: MIT. Status: feature-complete for most C11; ~11.6k GitHub stars, ~1k forks as of 2025. Self-hosting: chibicc compiles itself, plus real-world programs like Git, SQLite, and libpng with their test suites passing. §2 Technique / contribution The pipeline is the most readable...

The Per-Opcode Template JIT Pattern

§1 Provenance HotSpot Template Interpreter (Sun Microsystems, ~2002+): the urtext of this pattern. See "The Java HotSpot Performance Engine Architecture" ( https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/whitepaper.html) . Erlang BEAM (Ericsson, 1998+): the JIT in OTP 24+ (BeamAsm, https://www.erlang.org/blog/a-first-look-at-the-jit/ ) is template-style, written in C++ over asmjit. Lua/LuaJIT 2.x interpreter (Mike Pall): the interpreter is itself a hand-written assembler with one template per op. JIT is trace-based, but interpreter design is template. Sparkplug (V8, 2021),...

Wasm Baseline Compilers: Liftoff, RabaldrMonkey, Winch

§1 Provenance V8 Liftoff (Clemens Backes et al.), 2018+. V8 blog: https://v8.dev/blog/liftoff . Source: https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/refs/heads/master/src/wasm/baseline/liftoff-compiler.cc . SpiderMonkey RabaldrMonkey (a.k.a. sm-base, Lars T. Hansen et al.), 2017+. Source in mozilla-central js/src/wasm/WasmBaselineCompile.cpp . Wasmtime Winch (Bytecode Alliance, lead by Saul Cabrera at Shopify and Chris Fallin), 2023+. RFC: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/rfcs/blob/main/accepted/wasmtime-baseline-compilation.md . README: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/winch/README.md . Comparative study: Ben L. Titzer, "Whose Baseline Compiler Is It Anyway?" CGO 2024, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444855 , arXiv https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.13241 . §2...

Copy-and-Patch Compilation

§1 Provenance Authors: Haoran Xu and Fredrik Kjolstad (Stanford University). Venue: PLDI 2021, "Copy-and-Patch Compilation: A fast compilation algorithm for high-level languages and bytecode." Canonical PDF: https://fredrikbk.com/publications/copy-and-patch.pdf . ACM DOI: 10.1145/3485513. Production deployment: CPython 3.13 JIT (Brandt Bucher, Sept-Oct 2024). PEP 744: https://peps.python.org/pep-0744/ . Python 3.13 release notes: https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.13.html . LWN article "Adding a JIT compiler to CPython" ( https://lwn.net/Articles/977855/) . Author's homepage and lab page: https://fredrikbk.com/ , https://kjolstad.io/ ....

Classical Single-Pass Code Generation

§1 Provenance Aho, Sethi, Ullman, "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools" (the Dragon Book), 1st ed 1986, 2nd ed (Aho, Lam, Sethi, Ullman) 2006. ISBN 0-321-48681-1. Cooper, Torczon, "Engineering a Compiler," 3rd ed, Morgan Kaufmann, Nov 2022 (ISBN 978-0-12-815412-0). Won the TAA Textbook Excellence Award in 2024. Publisher page: https://shop.elsevier.com/books/engineering-a-compiler/cooper/978-0-12-815412-0 . ScienceDirect TOC: https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128154120/engineering-a-compiler . Muchnick, "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation," 1997 (still cited). Wirth, "Compiler Construction" (free PDF from ETH)....

JavaScriptCore Baseline JIT

§1 Provenance Project: JavaScriptCore (JSC), the JavaScript engine in Apple WebKit/Safari. Architect-of-record: Filip Pizlo (Apple), with contributions from Gavin Barraclough, Geoffrey Garen, Saam Barati, and others. Origin: ~2008 (the "SquirrelFish Extreme" / "Nitro" announcement), continuously evolved since. Authoritative writeups: Filip Pizlo, "Speculation in JavaScriptCore" ( https://webkit.org/blog/10308/speculation-in-javascriptcore/) , 2020. Pizlo DLS/VMIL 2017 slides, "The JavaScriptCore Virtual Machine" ( http://www.filpizlo.com/slides/pizlo-dls2017-vmil2017-jscvm-slides.pdf) . Saelo (Samuel Gross), "JavaScriptCore Internals Part II: The LLInt and Baseline...

Sparkplug: V8's Non-Optimizing Baseline JavaScript Compiler

§1 Provenance Designer: Leszek Swirski (V8 team, Google). Released: V8 v9.1, May 2021. Primary source: V8 blog post "Sparkplug, a non-optimizing JavaScript compiler" ( https://v8.dev/blog/sparkplug) . Source code: V8 source tree under src/baseline/ ( https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/) . Related research framing: Ben L. Titzer, "Whose Baseline Compiler Is It Anyway?" CGO 2024 ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444855) , arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.13241 . Lineage references: V8 Full-Codegen (2008+, retired around v5.9 in 2017) and Crankshaft (also...

Naive Emission Techniques