2007 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
A Register-Free Abstract Prolog Machine with Jumbo Instructions
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The majority of current Prolog systems are based on the WAM, in which registers are used to pass procedure arguments and store temporary data. In this paper, we present a stack machine for Prolog, named
TOAM Jr
., which departs from the TOAM adopted in early versions of B-Prolog in that it employs no registers for temporary data and it offers variable-size instructions for encoding unification and procedure calls. TOAM Jr. is suitable for fast bytecode interpretation: the omission of registers facilitates instruction merging and the use of jumbo instructions results in more compact code and execution of fewer instructions than the use of fine-grained instructions. TOAM Jr. is employed in B-Prolog version 7.0. Benchmarking shows that TOAM Jr. helps significantly improve the performance: the execution speed is increased by 48% on a Windows PC and 77% on a Linux machine. Despite the overhead on standard Prolog programs caused by the adoption of a spaghetti stack to support event handling and constraint solving, B-Prolog version 7.0 compares favorably well with the state-of-the-art WAM-based Prolog systems.