Type-Safe Optimisation of Plugin Architectures

Programmers increasingly implement plugin architectures in type-safe object-oriented languages such as Java. A virtual machine can dynamically load class files containing plugins, and a JIT compiler can do optimisations such as method inlining. Until now, the best known approach to type-safe method inlining in the presence of dynamic class loading is based on Class Hierarchy Analysis. Flow analyses that are more powerful than Class Hierarchy Analysis lead to more inlining but are more time consuming and not known to be type safe. In this paper we present and justify a new approach to type-safe method inlining in the presence of dynamic class loading. First we present experimental results that show that there are major advantages to analysing all locally available plugins at start-up time. If we analyse the locally available plugins at start-up time, then flow analysis is only needed at start-up time and when downloading plugins from the Internet, that is, when long pauses are expecte...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SAS
• Authors: Neal Glew, Jens Palsberg, Christian Grothoff
• Keywords: Class Hierarchy Analysis, Formal Methods, Method Inlining, SAS 2005, Type-safe Method