The Structure and Performance of Interpreters

Interpreted languages have become increasingly popular due to demands for rapid program development, ease of use, portability, and safety. Beyond the general impression that they are "slow,"however, little has been documented about the performance of interpreters as a class of applications. This paper examines interpreter performance by measuring and analyzing interpreters from both software and hardware perspectives. As examples, we measure the MIPSI, Java, Perl, and Tcl interpreters running an array of micro and macro benchmarks on a DEC Alpha platform. Our measurementsof these interpreters relate performance to the complexity of the interpreter's virtual machine and demonstrate that native runtime libraries can play a key role in providing good performance. From an architectural perspective, we show that interpreter performance is primarily a function of the interpreter itself and is relatively independent of the application being interpreted. We also demonstrate tha...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Theodore H. Romer, Dennis Lee, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Alec Wolman, Wayne A. Wong, Jean-Loup Baer, Brian N. Bershad, Henry M. Levy
• Keywords: ASPLOS 1996, Interpreter, Interpreter Performance, Interpreters Relate Performance, Programming Languages