New TR on Reciver Class Distributions for Object-oriented Languages

The Cecil group at the University of Washington is pleased to announce
the availability of a new technical report (UW-CS TR 94-03-05)
titled "Measurement and Application of Dynamic Receiver Class
Distributions". The report is available via anonymous ftp from
cs.washington.edu in /pub/chambers/specialize.ps.Z, or through our WWW
site at
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/cecil/www/cecil-home.html.


The abstract of the report is shown below:


          Measurement and Application of Dynamic Receiver Class Distributions
              Charles D. Garrett, Jeffrey Dean, David Grove, and Craig Chambers


                      Department of Computer Science and Engineering, FR-35
                                                    University of Washington


Abstract


Dynamic binding slows down object-oriented programs. Dynamic dispatch
mechanisms which work well where all receiver classes are equally
likely are too pessimistic because at most call sites one receiver
class predominates. We apply dynamic profile information to determine
the dynamic execution frequency distributions of the classes of
receivers at call sites. We show that these distributions are heavily
skewed towards the most commonly occurring receiver class across
several different languages (C++, Self, and Cecil). Moreover, we show
that the distributions are stable across program inputs, from one
version of a program to another, and even to some extent across
programs that share library code. Finally, we demonstrate that
significant run-time performance improvements for object-oriented
programs can be gained by exploiting the information contained in
dynamic receiver class distributions in a relatively simple optimizing
compiler.


We would appreciate hearing any comments or questions regarding this report.


    -Jeff


Jeffrey Dean (jdean@cs.washington.edu) Graduate Student
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering University of Washington
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.