NWScript JIT engine: Intermediate Representation (IR) design

Last time, I discussed how parameterized scripts turn out to actually work in NWScript, plus I delved into some details as to how the NWScript analyzer performs its first analysis pass, the structural analysis phase.

Although the NWScript VM need not go further than the structural analysis phase in order to correctly execute parameterized scripts[1], if we were to wish to create a JIT system for NWScript that worked to any degree of efficiency, it’s necessary to perform some more advanced analysis. This additional analysis is needed in order to “flatten” the script into a set of distinct variables that are manipulated by a fundamental instruction set.

The result of the structural analysis phase and the additional analysis phase (which I term the code analysis phase) is the NWScript IR, or intermediate representation. The intermediate representation (IR for short) is a set of data structures that describe the entire functional behavior of a script program in a format that is easy to translate into other forms.

Because the JIT system is designed to be easily extensible to multiple backends, the NWScript analyzer’s analysis phases do not directly emit any machine instructions; it is the job of the JIT backend to translate the resultant IR into a JIT-specific program representation. For the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on the IR itself.

The NWScript IR is designed with several principles in mind:

  • The IR should be designed in such a way that it’s easy to consume from a variety of code generation backends.
  • Each IR instruction should (generally) be independent of any previous instructions. That is, one should not need to track an inordinate amount of state specific to simply processing the IR in order to process each IR instruction. (As you’ll find out, this guideline is partially violated in two occasions for simplicity’s sake, but it generally holds true.) This implies that a non-optimizing backend should generally be able to consume the IR in more or less a single pass, without requiring significant postprocessing work.

With these loose characteristics in mind, let’s look at the basic layout of the IR. The IR consists of a set of in-memory C++ data structures (currently, no serialization format is designed; the backend must be able to directly interface with C++ data structures). These data structures encapsulate the following core concepts:

  • A NWScriptVariable, describing a strongly typed symbolic location in which data can be retained. Unlike the NWScript instruction set’s stack-based system, variables can be referenced freely. Variables can be marked as constant, and can fall under various classifications (locals, globals, parameters, return values, call site (outgoing) parameters, call site (outgoing) return values, etc.) Locals have well-defined lifetimes that are bounded by a series of specific instructions, whereas other variable classes have other, generally obvious lifetime semantics.
  • A NWScriptInstruction, which contains an underlying IR opcode, plus data and variable linkages that form the operands of the instruction. Not all IR instructions are direct analogs of NWScript instructions; some instructions have multiple mappings, or no direct mappings at all.
  • A NWScriptControlFlow. The control flow object represents a contiguous span of IR instructions that are neither the target of a branch, nor the source of a branch. From the IR perspective, a control flow contains a list of IR instructions, a description of how the control flow terminates (i.e. fallthrough, unconditional branch, conditional brach, end of function, merge, etc.), and a list of links to up to two successor control flows. (The successor links point to both forks of a conditional control flow transfer, or one of the links points to the fall through / unconditional endpoint of an unconditional control flow transfer.)
  • A NWScriptSubroutine, representing an IR subroutine. An IR subroutine can represent either a full-fleged NWScript subroutine, or the resume label of a STORE_STATE instruction. In either case, a subroutine groups together a list of control flows, strongly typed parameter variables, strongly typed return types, and several other pieces of information (such as a name, if we could learn the name of a subroutine from a debug symbol file for the script we are analyzing, should we have been able to locate symbols (not required)).

There are several other minor data structures which I will not describe here, as they are not particularly important for understanding the design of the IR. Additionally, various other attributes are associated with these above data items (such as a list of parent links for the control flow object), but these are similarly not required for a basic understanding.

The IR instruction set itself consists of the following operations:

typedef enum _INSTR
  I_CREATE,       // Create variable with type (no value)
  I_DELETE,       // Delete variable
  I_ASSIGN,       // Copy (assign) variables
  I_JZ,           // Jump if zero
  I_JNZ,          // Jump if not zero
  I_JMP,          // Jump unconditionally [deprecated]
  I_CALL,         // Call subroutine
  I_RETN,         // Return from subroutine
  I_ACTION,       // Call script action
  I_SAVE_STATE,   // Save state for script situation
  I_LOGAND,       // Logical AND (&&)
  I_LOGOR,        // Logical OR (||)
  I_INCOR,        // Bitwise OR (|)
  I_EXCOR,        // Bitwise XOR (^)
  I_BOOLAND,      // Bitwise AND (&)
  I_EQUAL,        // Compare (==)
  I_NEQUAL,       // Compare (!=)
  I_GEQ,          // Compare (>=)
  I_GT,           // Compare (>)
  I_LT,           // Compare (<)
  I_LEQ,          // Compare (<=)
  I_SHLEFT,       // Shift left (<<)
  I_SHRIGHT,      // Shift signed right (>>, SAR)
  I_USHRIGHT,     // Shift unsigned right (>>)
  I_ADD,          // Add (+), concatenate strings
  I_SUB,          // Subtract (-)
  I_MUL,          // Multiply (*)
  I_DIV,          // Divide (/)
  I_MOD,          // Modulus (%)
  I_NEG,          // Negation (-)
  I_COMP,         // Complement (~)
  I_NOT,          // Logical NOT (!)
  I_INC,          // Increment
  I_DEC,          // Decrement
  I_TEST,      // Set zero/not zero based on variable value
  I_INITIALIZE,   // Set variable to default value


typedef const enum _INSTR * PCINSTR;

If you’ve taken a look at Tim Smith’s NWScript instruction set reference, many of the instructions should look familiar to you, in the form of a condensed set of the fundamental NWScript instruction opcodes. However, there are several new instructions, and as I had mentioned previously, you may notice that some NWScript instruction opcodes have no direct equivalents (such as the purely stack manipulation instructions).

Most instructions are relatively straightforward to understand from the comments above, so I will not describe each and every one of them; additionally, for most (data-processing) instructions, a uniform API is provided to retrieve the input/output variable objects affected, making code generation simple.

Several instructions are, however, more structural than data-processing in nature and bear further explanation; these have been highlighted in blue.

The I_CREATE and I_DELETE instructions bound the lifetime of a local variable. When an I_CREATE is issued, a variable is activated for use until an I_DELETE is encountered. These are provided as hints to the backend as to when a variable need remain active. These instructions are loose exceptions to the general design guideline that an instruction should not involve previous state, and can be thought of as optimization hints (versus creating all local variables up front from a code generation perspective).

I_SAVE_STATE represents the operation of the STORE_STATE and STORE_STATEALL NWScript instructions; it supplies a list of local and global variables used by the resume point of a STORE_STATE instruction, as well as a subroutine descriptor describing the resume point’s IR-level instruction code. (The analyzer raises a STORE_STATE resume point into a first class subroutine, with all local variables inherited from the ‘parent’ subroutine having been turned into parameters.) This allows the backend to easily generate code to save the required locals away at runtime for the next operation that consumes a saved state.

I_TEST is used by the conditional jump instructions. As a special exception to the rule that one instruction does not depend on the state of another, the I_TEST instruction must be immediately followed by a conditional jump (I_JZ or I_JNZ) instruction. Its purpose is to take an integer-typed variable operand and make it into a Boolean / logical 1 or zero value for use in the immediately following conditional jump. The purpose of a separate I_TEST instruction is to prevent temporary variables generated by a conditional operation from having to always be bifurcated across both control flow forks in the IR.

I_INITIALIZE supplies a hard initialization sequence point for a variable at which a variable must be assigned its type-specific default value. This IR instruction fulfills two purposes; it allows the backend to avoid emitting non-useful reinitialization code if the backend’s representation of variables are reused in a variable pool of some sort, and it allows the JIT backend to circumvent an issue with the IR raising phase relating to merging of variables across flows in some circumstances. (It is probable that the I_INITIALIZE instruction will go away and turn into simply a flag on a variable object once the merging problem I alluded to is no longer an issue. Justin tells me that he’s planning on writing a post describing the variable merging issue I mentioned, so I’ll let him provide the details there.)

Fear not, there is yet even more NWScript discussion upcoming; stay tuned…

[1] Actually, to be pedantic, there was a rather ugly hack I had inserted in the VM that manages to execute parameterized scripts with wrong parameter counts so long as they do not return a value. In the case of NWN2, this is a particularly important (and the most likely to be hit) case. However, this hack is obsolete with the structural analysis phase providing data on the number of parameters that the entry point symbol takes, so I will not detail the hack here.


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