Optimizing Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Languages With Polymorphic Inline Caches

: 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 gener...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1991
• Where: ECOOP
• Authors: Urs Hölzle, Craig Chambers, David Ungar
• Keywords: ECOOP 1991, Inline Caches, Median Speedup, Programming Languages, Type Information