使用LLVM JIT Compiler實作加速JNA

Abstract

廣義來說， JNI (Java Native Interface) 在調用原生函式庫上被視為強大但難以使用且易於出錯的介面，而JNA相較之下則提供程式設計者方便且容易使用的方式調用原生函式庫而不需使用者寫任何的JNI程式碼。雖然JNA有其方便之處，其主要缺點則在於其效能在實作上無法與JNI比肩。本篇論文將LLVM JIT編譯器加進JNA中，以根據其執行時習慣及對JNI的了解試圖使其加速。實驗結果對於呼叫一個參數的原生函式可得大約7.84%之效能改進。本篇研究在設計上對於執行時期優化的想法和傳統JIT 編輯器之使用方式不同，且遇到的問題與挑戰可做為其他有相似情境的研究者參考。

When Java Native Interface (JNI) is considered as a tedious and error-prone interface, Java Native Access (JNA) is more convenient and easily applied for programmers. JNA is an open source project which allows programmer to call native functions without writing any JNI codes. However, it suffers from the degradation of performance. In this thesis, we attach the LLVM JIT compiler into JNA to get better performance based on the study of Java Native Interface. The experiment results indicate about 7.84% performance improvement for calling a native function with only one argument. Our design is a non-traditional way of using the runtime compiler, and the challenges we encountered may help other researchers to face to the similar situations.