Overview

As shown in Figure 1, the Joeq system consists of seven major parts:

• Front-end: Handles the loading and parsing of input files, such as Java class files, SUIF files, and binary object files.

• Compiler: A framework for performing analyses and optimizations on code. This includes the intermediate representation (IR) of our compiler.

• Back-end: Converts the compiler's intermediate representation into native, executable code. This code can be output to an object file or written into memory to be executed. In addition, it generates metadata about the generated code, such as garbage collection maps and exception handling information.

• Interpreter: Directly interprets the various forms of compiler intermediate representations.

• Memory Manager: Organizes and manages memory. Joeq supports both explicitly-managed and garbage-collected memory.

• Dynamic: Provides profile data to the code analysis and optimization component, makes compilation policy decisions, and drives the dynamic compiler.

• Run-time Support: Provides runtime support for introspection, thread scheduling, synchronization, exception handling, interfacing to external code, and language-specific features such as dynamic type checking.

Sections 3 through 9 cover each of the components in detail.