Injecting Shortcuts for Faster Running Java Code

Abstract

Genetic Improvement of software applies search methods to existing software to improve the target program in some way. Impressive results have been achieved, including substantial speedups, using simple operations that replace, swap and delete lines or statements within the code. Often this is achieved by specialising code, removing parts that are unnecessary for particular use-cases. Previous work has shown that there is a great deal of potential in targeting more specialised operations that modify the code to achieve the same functionality in a different way. We propose six new edit types for Genetic Improvement of Java software, based on the insertion of break, continue and return statements. The idea is to add shortcuts that allow parts of the program to be skipped in order to speed it up. 10000 randomly-generated instances of each edit were applied to three open-source applications taken from GitHub. The key findings are: (1) compilation rates for inserted statements without surrounding "if" statements are 1.5-18.3%; (2) edits where the insert statement is embedded within an "if" have compilation rates of 3.2-55.8%; (3) of those that compiled, all 6 edits have a high rate of passing tests (Neutral Variant Rate), >60% in all but one case, and so have the potential to be performance improving edits. Finally, a preliminary experiment based on local search shows how these edits might be used in practice.