SSA-based Mobile Code: Implementation and Empirical Evaluation

Although one might expect transportation formats based on static single assignment form (SSA) to yield faster just-in-time compilation times than those based on stack-based virtual machines, this claim has not previously been validated in practice. We attempt to quantify the effect of using an SSA-based mobile code representation by integrating support for a verifiable SSA-based IR into Jikes RVM. Performance results, measured with various optimizations and on both the IA32 and PowerPC, show improvements in both compilation time and code quality.