Introducing the B3 JIT Compiler
As of r195562, WebKit’s FTL JIT (Faster Than Light Just In Time compiler) now uses a new backend on OS X. The Bare Bones Backend, or B3 for short, replaces LLVM as the low-level optimizer in the FTL JIT. While LLVM is an excellent optimizer, it isn’t specifically designed for the optimization challenges of dynamic languages like JavaScript. We felt that we could get a bigger speed-up if we combined the best of the FTL architecture with a new compiler backend that incorporated what we learned from using LLVM but was tuned specifically for our needs.
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We knew that we could get a speed-up on lots of real-world JavaScript code if we could get all of FTL’s high level optimizations without paying the full price of LLVM’s compile time. But we also knew that LLVM’s low-level optimizations were essential for benchmarks that ran long enough to hide compile time. This was a huge opportunity and a huge risk: beating LLVM’s compile times seemed easy, but it would only be a net win if the new backend could compete on throughput. […] We projected that if we could build a backend that compiled about ten times faster than LLVM while still generating comparable code, then we would get speed-ups on code that currently blocks on LLVM compilation.
