Perf4JS: Automatically Fixing Performance Problems in Real-World JavaScript Applications

随着动态语言(例如，JavaScript)变得越来越普遍，用这些语言编写的应用程序的性能对于确保响应性、高吞吐量和能效至关重要。不幸的是，查找和优化性能瓶颈目前主要是由少数专业开发人员执行的一个耗时的手动过程。其原因是，现有的动态语言程序分析技术受到基本限制，这些限制阻碍了工具自动进行有效的代码优化。拟议的项目将研究新的程序分析和重构技术，以满足高度动态语言的特定需求。我们期望这些全新的技术能够实现跨越多个领域、语言和软件质量目标的广泛应用程序。作为一个具体的应用，该提案侧重于自动提高现实世界中的JavaScript应用程序的性能。为此，我们将开发帮助开发人员发现优化机会的方法，通过用高效代码替换低效代码来重构它们，并通过可靠而现实地测量对性能的影响。我们预计，计划中的工作将对蓬勃发展的程序分析和性能分析研究领域产生重大影响。

As dynamic languages, e.g., JavaScript, are becoming more and more prevalent, the performance of applications written in these languages is crucial to ensure responsiveness, high throughput, and energy-efficiency. Unfortunately, finding and optimizing performance bottlenecks currently is a mostly manual and time-consuming process performed by few expert developers. The reason is that existing program analysis techniques for dynamic languages suffer from fundamental limitations that prevent tools from automating effective code optimizations. The proposed project will research novel program analysis and refactoring techniques that address the specific needs of highly dynamic languages. We expect these fundamentally new techniques to enable a wide range of applications across multiple domains, languages, and software quality goals. As a specific application, the proposal focuses on automatically improving the performance of real-world JavaScript applications. To this end, we will develop approaches that help developers to detect optimization opportunities, refactor them by replacing inefficient with efficient code, and by reliably and realistically measuring the effect on performance. We envision that the planned work has a significant impact on the thriving research fields of program analysis and performance analysis.