New TR on Class Hierarchy Analysis

The Cecil group at the University of Washington is pleased to announce
the availability of a new technical report (94-12-01) on optimizing
object-oriented programs by exploiting knowledge about their class
hierarchy. The report is available via our WWW site:


    http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/www/hierarchy.html


Or via anonymous ftp from:


    cs.washington.edu/pub/chambers/hierarchy-tr.ps.Z


The title and abstract of the report are:


Optimization of Object-Oriented Programs Using Static Class Hierarchy Analysis
                                Jeffrey Dean, David Grove, and Craig Chambers


Abstract


Optimizing compilers for object-oriented languages apply static class
analysis and other techniques to try to deduce precise information
about the possible classes of the receivers of messages; if
successful, dynamically-dispatched messages can be replaced with
direct procedure calls and potentially further optimized through
inline-expansion. By examining the complete inheritance graph of a
program, which we call class hierarchy analysis, the compiler can
improve the quality of static class information and thereby improve
run-time performance. In this paper we present class hierarchy
analysis and describe techniques for implementing this analysis
effectively in both statically- and dynamically-typed languages and
also in the presence of multi-methods. We also discuss how class
hierarchy analysis can be supported in an interactive programming
environment and, to some extent, in the presence of separate
compilation. Finally, we assess the bottom-line performance
improvement due to class hierarchy analysis alone and in combination
with two other "competing" optimizations, profile-guided receiver
class prediction and method specialization.


-- Jeff


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffrey Dean (jdean@cs.washington.edu) Graduate Student
Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington
                      http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jdean/index.html
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