First-class Runtime Generation of High-performance Types using Exotypes
Programming Language Design and Implementation 2014
Abstract
We introduce exotypes, user-defined types that combine the flexibility of meta-object protocols in dynamically-typed languages with the performance control of low-level languages. Like objects in dynamic languages, exotypes are defined programmatically at runtime, allowing behavior based on external data such as a database schema. To achieve high performance, we use staged programming to define the behavior of an exotype during a runtime compilation step and implement exotypes in Terra, a low-level staged programming language. We show how exotype constructors compose, and use exotypes to implement high-performance libraries for serialization, dynamic assembly, automatic differentiation, and probabilistic programming. Each exotype achieves expressiveness similar to libraries written in dynamically-typed languages but implements optimizations that exceed the performance of existing libraries written in low-level statically-typed languages. Though each implementation is significantly shorter, our serialization library is 11 times faster than Kryo, and our dynamic assembler is 3 to 20 times faster than Google's Chrome assembler.
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