Optimising bytecode emulation for prolog

Abstract

Byte-code representation has been used to implement several programming languages such as Lisp, ML, Prolog, or Java. In this work, we discuss the impact of several emulator optimisations for the Prolog system YAP. YAP obtains performance comparable or exceeding well-known Prolog systems by applying several different styles of optimisations, such as improving the emulation mechanism, exploiting the characteristics of the underlying hardware, and improving the abstract machine itself. We give throughout a detailed performance analysis, demonstrating that low-level optimisations can have a very significant impact on the whole system and across a range of architectures.