SkelOT: Reusing AOT Compilation Across EVM Contract Families
TL;DR
An AOT framework that lifts the unit of compilation reuse from code hash to family skeleton at contract-code-hash granularity and delivers a median per-contract speedup across family members under a compile budget targeting 75% execution-time coverage.
Abstract
Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilers (e.g., revmc, evmone, and DTVM) for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) reuse compilation artifacts at contract-code-hash granularity. This granularity is poorly matched to real EVM workloads dominated by \emph{contract families}: factory-, proxy-, and template-driven deployments that share instruction structure but differ in a small set of embedded constants. Across four EVM chains (Base, Ethereum, BSC, and Arbitrum), we find that 23.1--47.6\% of unique compilable bytecodes map to shared family skeletons within 10K-block windows. Per-hash AOT therefore redundantly recompiles structurally equivalent code, inflating compile time and artifact footprint while reducing workload coverage under finite compile budgets. We present \textsc{SkelOT}, an AOT framework that lifts the unit of compilation reuse from code hash to family skeleton. \textsc{SkelOT} compiles one native artifact per family, bakes invariant constants into the artifact, and reads variant constants from a per-contract runtime table. Built on revmc/LLVM and evaluated on a 10K-block Base mainnet corpus (3.52M transactions), \textsc{SkelOT} reduces compilation units by 47.5\%, artifact footprint by 57.4\%, and compile time by $2.19\times$, while preserving byte-identical execution outcomes versus per-hash AOT. At runtime, \textsc{SkelOT} delivers a $1.31\times$ median per-contract speedup across family members. Under a compile budget targeting 75\% execution-time coverage, \textsc{SkelOT} needs far fewer artifacts than per-hash AOT, and the advantage holds at every coverage target.