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Optimizing dynamically-typed object-oriented languages with polymorphic inline caches

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Book cover ECOOP'91 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 1991)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 512))

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Abstract

Polymorphic inline caches (PICs) provide a new way to reduce the overhead of polymorphic message sends by extending inline caches to include more than one cached lookup result per call site. For a set of typical object-oriented SELF programs, PICs achieve a median speedup of 11%.

As an important side effect, PICs collect type information by recording all of the receiver types actually used at a given call site. The compiler can exploit this type information to generate better code when recompiling a method. An experimental version of such a system achieves a median speedup of 27% for our set of SELF programs, reducing the number of non-inlined message sends by a factor of two.

Implementations of dynamically-typed object-oriented languages have been limited by the paucity of type information available to the compiler. The abundance of the type information provided by PICs suggests a new compilation approach for these languages, adaptive compilation. Such compilers may succeed in generating very efficient code for the time-critical parts of a program without incurring distracting compilation pauses.

This work has been supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Nationalfonds), an IBM graduate student fellowship, NSF Presidential Young Investigator Grant # CCR-8657631 and by Sun, IBM, Apple, Cray, Tandem, TI, and DEC.

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Author notes

  1. David Ungar

    Present address: Sun Labs, Sun Microsystems, Mail Stop MTV 10-21, 2500 Garcia St., 94043, Mountain View, CA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, 94305, Stanford, CA

    Urs Hölzle, Craig Chambers & David Ungar

Authors
  1. Urs Hölzle
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  2. Craig Chambers
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  3. David Ungar
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Correspondence to David Ungar .

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Pierre America

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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hölzle, U., Chambers, C., Ungar, D. (1991). Optimizing dynamically-typed object-oriented languages with polymorphic inline caches. In: America, P. (eds) ECOOP'91 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 1991. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 512. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0057013

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0057013

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-54262-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47537-8

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