alloy: small dynamic recompiler engine
Alloy is a transpiler framework that allows for pluggable frontends for decoding guest machine instructions (such as PPC) and pluggable backends for generating host code (such as x64). It features an SSA IR designed to model machine instructions and vector operations and compilation passes that seek to efficiently optimize previously-optimized code.
Future versions will cache generated code across runs and enable offline precompilation.
Frontends
Frontends are responsible for translating guest machine instructions into IR. Information about the guest machine and ABI is used to support efficient CPU state accesses and debug information.
- PPC64 with Altivec extenions
Backends
A backend takes optimized IR and assembles an implementation-specific result. The backend is also responsible for executing the code it generates and supporting debugging features (such as breakpoints).
- IVM: bytecode interpreter
- x64: IA-64 with AVX2 code generator