Visualizing The Intermediate Representation of Just-in-Time Compilers

2021/06/09 by HeuiChan Lim, Stephen Kobourov, Lim, HeuiChan +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Programming Languages (cs.PL) #Software Engineering Research #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.00063

openalex publication_date 2021/06/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers are used by many modern programming systems in order to improve performance. Bugs in JIT compilers provide exploitable security vulnerabilities and debugging them is difficult as they are large, complex, and dynamic. Current debugging and visualization tools deal with static code and are not suitable in this domain. We describe a new approach for simplifying the large and complex intermediate representation, generated by a JIT compiler and visualize it with a metro map metaphor to aid developers in debugging. Experiments using our prototype implementation on Google's V8 JavaScript interpreter and TurboFan JIT compiler demonstrate that it can help identify and localize buggy code.

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