Camil Demetrescu edited approach.tex  over 8 years ago

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\subsection{Overview}  \label{ss:overview}  Consider the generic OSR scenario shown in Figure~\ref{fi:osr-dynamics}. A base function \fbase\ is executed and it can either terminate normally (dashed lines), or an OSR event may transfer control to a variant \fvariant. The decision of whether an OSR should be fired at a given point \textsf{L} of \fbase\  is based on an {\em OSR condition}. A typical example is a guard testing whether a function \fbase\ has become unsafe and execution needs to fall back to a safe version \fvariant. This scenario includes deoptimization of functions generated with aggressive speculative optimizations. Another example is a profile counter reaching a certain hotness threshold, which indicates that \textsf{f} is taking longer than expected and is worth optimizing. This is a frequent scenario in JIT-based virtual machines. Classical OSR implementations adjust the stack so that execution can continue in \fvariant\ with the current frame \mynote{add citations}. This requires manipulating the program at machine code level and is highly ABI- and compiler-dependent. A simpler approach, which we follow in this article, consists of creating a new frame every time an OSR is fired, essentially regarding an OSR transition as a function call \mynote{cite WebKit and McVM}.