Compound values are not universally supported in virtual machine (vM)-based programming systems and languages. However, providing data structures with value characteristics can be beneficial. On one hand, programming systems and languages can adequately represent physical quantities with compound values and avoid inconsistencies, for example, in re­ presentation of large numbers. On the other hand, just-in-time (JIT) compilers, which are often found in VMs, can rely on the fact that compound values are immutable, which is an important property in optimizing programs. Considering this, compound values have an optimizationpotential that can be put to use by implementing them in VMs in a way that is efficient in memory usage and execution time. Yet,optimized compound values in VMs face certain challenges: to maintain consistency, it should not be observable by the program whethercompound values are represented in an optimized way by a VM; an optimization should take into account, that the usage of compoundvalues can exhibit certain patterns at run-time; and that necessary value-incompatible properties due to implementation restrictions should be reduced.

We propose a technique to detect and compress common patterns of compound value usage at run-time to improve memory usage and execution speed. Our approach identifies patterns of frequent compound value references and introduces abbreviated forms forthem. Thus, it is possible to store multiple inter-referenced compound values in an inlined memory representation, reducing the overhead of metadata and object references. We extend our approach by a notion of limited mutability, using cells that act as barriers for our approach and provide a location for shared, mutable access with the possibility of type specialization. We devise an extension to our approach that allows us to express automatic unboxing of boxed primitive data types in terms of our initial technique. We show that our approach is versatile enough to express another optimization technique that relies on values, such as Booleans, that are unique throughout a programming system. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to re-use learned usage patterns and optimizations across program runs, thus reducing the performance impact of pattern recognition.

We show in a best-case prototype that the implementation of our approach is feasible and can also be applied to general purpose programming systems, namely implementations of the Racket language and Squeak/Smalltalk. In several micro- benchmarks, we found that our approach can effectively reduce memory consumption and improve execution speed.