Overcoming the Challenges to Feedback-Directed Optimization

Feedback-directed optimization (FDO) is a general term used to describe any technique that alters a program’s execution based on tendencies observed in its present or past runs. This paper reviews the current state of affairs in FDO and discusses the challenges inhibiting further acceptance of these techniques. It also argues that current trends in hardware and software technology have resulted in an execution environment where immutable executables and traditional static optimizations are no longer sufficient. It explains how we can improve the effectiveness of our optimizers by increasing our understanding of program behavior, and it provides examples of temporal behavior that we can (or could in the future) exploit during optimization.