[Scheme'26] An Incremental Approach to JIT Construction

An Incremental Approach to JIT Construction (Video, Scheme 2026) Shaurya Raswan, Mark Barbone, Nico Lehmann, Joe Gibbs Politz (University of California at San Diego, USA; Cornell University, USA; University of Chile, Chile; University of California at San Diego, USA) Abstract: Just-in-time (JIT) compilation has become a common tool for language runtimes. JIT compilers have a reputation for being complex, leaving a pedagogical gap between foundational Ahead-of-Time (AOT) concepts and dynamic code generation. This paper presents an incremental, classroom-scale approach to building a JIT compiler in manageable steps. By contrasting an AOT and a JIT backend, we expose core dynamic concerns, including executable buffers, persistent interactive state, mutation, and runtime type optimizations. The result is a minimal yet realistic educational JIT that successfully supports a Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL) and a first-call specialization mechanism. Article: https://doi.org/10.1145/3830440.3832304 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-8235-3928, https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8249-7699, https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6838-3714, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1565-2362 Video Tags: Compilers, JIT Compilation, Rust, Scheme, doi:10.1145/3830440.3832304, orcid:0009-0002-8235-3928, orcid:0009-0006-8249-7699, orcid:0009-0003-6838-3714, orcid:0000-0003-1565-2362 Presentation at the Scheme 2026 workshop, August 29, 2026, https://icfp26.sigplan.org/home/scheme-2026 Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN.