Controlled Stack Hacking for the MoarVM JIT Compiler
Hi readers! Today I have a story about a recently-merged set of patches that allows MoarVM to use the on-stack return pointer to reduce the overhead of exception handling and other VM features for JIT compiled code. Maybe you'll find it interesting. As you might know, MoarVM Is a bytecode interpreter. In some situations, MoarVM internals need to know the current position in the execution of the program. For instance in exception handling , all exception thrown within a block are caught by the associated CATCH block or propagated if no such block exists. Such blocks are indicated as a range within the bytecode, and we find the associated CATCH block by comparing the current position with the known ranges. This is relatively straightforward to implement for the interpreter, because the interpreter must maintain a 'current position' pointer simply to function. (MoarVM stores a pointer to this pointer in a thread context object so that it is available throughout the VM)...