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Message Dispatch on Pipelined Processors

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ECOOP’95 — Object-Oriented Programming, 9th European Conference, Åarhus, Denmark, August 7–11, 1995 (ECOOP 1995)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 952))

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Abstract

Object-oriented systems must implement message dispatch efficiently in order not to penalize the object-oriented programming style. We characterize the performance of most previously published dispatch techniques for both statically- and dynamically-typed languages with both single and multiple inheritance. Hardware organization (in particular, branch latency and superscalar instruction issue) significantly impacts dispatch performance. For example, inline caching may outperform C++-style “vtables” on deeply pipelined processors even though it executes more instructions per dispatch.

We also show that adding support for dynamic typing or multiple inheritance does not significantly impact dispatch speed for most techniques, especially on superscalar machines. Instruction space overhead (calling sequences) can exceed the space cost of data structures (dispatch tables), so that minimal table size may not imply minimal run-time space usage.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Karel Driesen & Urs Hölzle

  2. Object Systems Group, Centre Universitaire d’Informatique, Université de Genève, 24 rue Général Dufour, CH-1211, Genève 4, Switzerland

    Jan Vitek

Authors
  1. Karel Driesen
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  2. Urs Hölzle
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  3. Jan Vitek
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Keio University, 3-14-1 Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama, 223, Japan

    Mario Tokoro

  2. Rank Xerox Research Centre, 6 Chemin de Maupertuis, F-38240, Meylan, France

    Remo Pareschi

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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Driesen, K., Hölzle, U., Vitek, J. (1995). Message Dispatch on Pipelined Processors. In: Tokoro, M., Pareschi, R. (eds) ECOOP’95 — Object-Oriented Programming, 9th European Conference, Åarhus, Denmark, August 7–11, 1995. ECOOP 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 952. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49538-X_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49538-X_13

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60160-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49538-3

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