Efficient Polymorphic Calls - Driesen, Karel

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Résumé :
To achieve superior performance, language implementers and computer architects must pay increasingly close attention to polymorphic function calls. Such calls are at the heart of all object-oriented languages, including C++, Smalltalk, and Java. br/ The implementation of object-oriented languages has been an active topic of research since the 1960s when the first Simula compiler was written, and there has been renewed interest in the topic in the early 1980s with the growing popularity of many object-oriented programming languages. Both software and hardware have changed considerably in the interim, to the point where many assumptions based on older studies are no longer valid. Furthermore, today's processors are deeply pipelined and can execute instructions out-of-order, making it difficult to predict the execution time of even simple code sequences. Given the long history of research into the implementation of polymorphic calls and the relatively mature standing it has achieved, emEfficient Polymorphic Calls/em aims to present an up-to-date authoritative guide to the field. br/ emEfficient Polymorphic Calls/em is a key resource for practitioners building an object-oriented system, who look for fast polymorphic call resolution under particular hardware constraints, graduate students interested in the development of object-oriented systems, and anyone with an interest in programming language implementation at the software or hardware level.

Sommaire:
1 Introduction.- 1.1 Polymorphism.- 1.2 Inheritance.- 1.3 Problem statement.- 1.4 Overview.- 2 Polymorphic calls.- 2.1 Basic construct.- 2.2 Hand-crafted polymorphism.- 2.3 Object-oriented message dispatch.- 3 Software techniques for efficient polymorphic calls.- 3.1 Basic message dispatch in object-oriented languages.- 3.2 Dynamic techniques.- 3.3 Static techniques.- 3.4 Memory cost.- 3.5 Programming environment aspects.- 3.6 Summary.- 4 Row displacement compression of message dispatch tables.- 4.1 Class-based row displacement.- 4.2 Selector-based row displacement.- 4.3 Compression results.- 4.4 Optimizing table compression speed.- 4.5 interactive programming environments.- 4.6 Summary.- 5 Analysis of dispatch sequences on modern processor architectures.- 5.1 Parameters influencing performance.- 5.2 Dispatch cost calculation.- 5.3 Cost of dynamic typing and multiple inheritance.- 5.4 Influence of processor implementation.- 5.5 Limitations.- 5.6 Summary.- 6 Measurement of virtual function call overhead on modern processors.- 6.1 Virtual function tables and the thunk variant.- 6.2 Superscalar processors.- 6.3 Method.- 6.4 Results.- 6.5 Discussion.- 6.6 Summary.- 7 Hardware techniques.- 7.1 Software vs. hardware prediction.- 7.2 Hardware indirect branch prediction.- 7.3 Indirect branch frequency.- 7.4 Experimental setup.- 7.5 Problem statement.- 8 Basic indirect branch predictors.- 8.1 Branch target buffer.- 8.2 Two-level predictor.- 8.3 History buffers.- 8.4 history tables.- 8.5 Summary.- 9 Hybrid indirect branch predictors.- 9.1 Hybrid prediction.- 9.2 Branch classification.- 9.3 Dual-path hybrid prediction.- 9.4 Cascaded prediction.- 9.5 Summary.- 10 Related work.- 10.1 Software techniques.- 10.2 Polymorphic calls in Java.- 10.3 Hardware techniques.- 11 Conclusions.- 12 Glossary.- 13 References.- Appendix A Polymorphic call sequences in assembly.- Appendix B Indirect branch execution intervals.- Appendix C Basic prediction accuracy per benchmark.