Understanding JIT Optimisations By Decompilation

What is the focus of your work these days?

I work at Shopify, which is a large Canadian e-commerce company, I work on the Ruby programming language, trying to optimize it, to make it work more efficiently. But I also do a lot of work in the Java system because the technology we use to optimize Ruby is based on Java technology such as Graal and Truffle.

What is the motivation for your talk?

Understanding what the Java JIT compiler is doing. There are a few techniques we can use, such as looking at the machine code or looking at the compiler logs, or we can also look at the compiler data structures. But these are quite advanced topics. It requires really quite deep expert knowledge to do it. At Shopify, we're building a tool that we hope helps make it easier to understand what the compiler is doing. What it does is give you back Java code from your compiled Java code after it's been optimized. We hope this makes it easier for people to understand what the compiler is doing.

What is the persona and the level of the target audience?

I think it's applicable to several levels. If you are aware that there is a JIT compiler, but not what it's capable of or anything about how it works, then you can use the tool to just gain some more understanding. So it should be approachable to anyone who is aware there's a JIT compiler. If you're an expert who works with JIT compilers trying to tune them and trying to get the best performance out of your app, then you can actually use the tool as something practical in your day-to-day work. So it should be approachable to anyone who's got any kind of interest in Java.