Mechanism for Performing Register Allocation of Program Variables Based on Priority Spills and Assignments

摘要

A mechanism for performing register allocation based on priority spills and assignments is disclosed. A method of embodiments of the invention includes repetitively detecting fat points during a compilation process of a software program running on a virtual machine of a computer system, each fat point representing a program point having a high register pressure, the high register pressure occurs when a number of live program variables of the software program living at a given program point of the software program is greater than a number of available processor registers of the computer system. The method further includes choosing a fat point with a highest register pressure, selecting a live program variable having a lowest priority at the chosen fat point, and spilling the lowest priority live program variable to memory of the computer system.