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Taming message passing: Efficient method look-up for dynamically typed languages

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Book cover Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 1994)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 821))

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Abstract

Method look-up for dynamically typed object-oriented languages, such as smalltalk-80 or objective-c, is usually implemented by a cached inheritance search. Unfortunately, this technique is slow. A selector-indexed dispatch table implementation speeds up messages to within 10% of the speed of a statically typed language such as C++. We present a fast technique for generating compact selector-indexed dispatch tables.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Object Systems Group, Centre Universitaire d'Informatique, Université de Genève, 24 r. General Dufour, CH-1211, Genève 4, Suisse

    Jan Vitek

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055, V8W 3P6, Victoria BC, Canada

    R. Nigel Horspool

Authors
  1. Jan Vitek
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  2. R. Nigel Horspool
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Mario Tokoro Remo Pareschi

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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Vitek, J., Horspool, R.N. (1994). Taming message passing: Efficient method look-up for dynamically typed languages. In: Tokoro, M., Pareschi, R. (eds) Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 821. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0052195

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0052195

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-58202-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48567-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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