Ph.D. thesis available: "Whole-Program Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages"

I'm happy to announce that my Ph.D. thesis, "Whole-Program
Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages", is now available as a
University of Washington Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
Technical Report, UW-CSE-96-11-05. A postscript version of it can be
downloaded from:


  http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/www/Papers/jdean-thesis.html


Alternatively, you can access it through the UW CSE Technical Report page:


  http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/tr/techreports.html


Here's the abstract:


Title: "Whole-Program Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages"


Author: Jeffrey Dean


Abstract:


This dissertation examines the use of whole-program optimization as a
way of improving the performance of object-oriented programming
languages. Although object-oriented programming conveys a number of
software engineering benefits, heavy application of its trade mark
feature, dynamic dispatching, imposes severe performance penalties
when programs are compiled using traditional compilation
techniques. Several new techniques that rely on whole-program
optimization are described, and these techniques substantially improve
the performance of object-oriented programs written in Cecil, Java,
C++, and Modula-3.


Among the new techniques is class hierarchy analysis, which provides
the compiler with knowledge of the class hierarchy of the entire
program. This is an especially important opti mization, because it
allows programmers to write their programs using dynamic dispatching
for all operations, which preserves maximal flexibility and
extensibility, but permits the com piler to optimize away this
flexibility when it is unused by a particular program. Exhaustive
class testing allows the compiler to optimize message sends that have
a limited degree of poly morphism by inserting tests to partition the
potential classes of objects that can appear at a call site. A
selective specialization algorithm combines static information with
dynamic profile data to determine where it is profitable to compile
multiple, specialized versions of a single source routine. Inlining
trials provide a means of making inlining decisions that take into
account the effects of post-inlining optimizations. Whole-program
optimization in an interactive programming environment is made
possible through the use of selective recompilation, a technique for
invalidating only compiled code that is affected by a programming
change. The techniques described in the thesis have been implemented
in the Vortex compiler, a whole-program optimizing compiler developed
as part of this dissertation.


Whole-program not only speeds up existing features of object-oriented
languages, but it also allows new features to be added to languages
with little or no cost, enabling more general models of dispatching
that result in more natural and uniform programming languages. The
benefits of the optimization techniques described in this thesis are
shown to already be important, and their importance is likely to only
increase as people adopt more and more object-oriented programming
styles.


Note: A University of Washington Dept. of Computer Science technical
report with this same title was published as UW-CSE-TR 96-06-02. These
two technical reports are quite different, despite having the same
title.


Any feedback you might have would be appreciated.


-- Jeff


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffrey Dean (jdean@pa.dec.com) Member of Research Staff
Western Research Laboratory Digital Equipment Corporation
                                      http://www.research.digital.com/people/jdean
--

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