A general framework for inheritance management and method dispatch in object-oriented languages

Abstract

This paper presents the DT Framework, a collection of object-oriented classes representing a generalized framework for inheritance management and table-based method dispatch. It demonstrates how most existing table-based dispatch techniques can be generalized and made incremental, so that relevant entries in the dispatch table are modified each time a selector or class hierarchy link is added or removed. The incremental nature makes the framework highly efficient, with low millisecond average modification time, and supports table-based dispatch even in schema-evolving languages. During table maintenance, the framework detects and records inheritance conflicts, and maintains information useful during compile-time optimizations.