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Eliminating virtual function calls in C++ programs

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Book cover ECOOP ’96 — Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1098))

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Abstract

We have designed and implemented an optimizing source-to-source C++ compiler that reduces the frequency of virtual function calls. Our prototype implementation demonstrates the value of OO-specific optimization for C++. Despite some limitations of our system, and despite the low frequency of virtual function calls in some of the programs, optimization improves the performance of a suite of large C++ applications totalling over 90,000 lines of code by a median of 18% over the original programs and reduces the number of virtual function calls by a median factor of five. For more call-intensive versions of the same programs, performance improved by a median of 26% and the number of virtual calls dropped by a factor of 17.5. Our measurements indicate that inlining barely increases code size, and that for most programs, the instruction cache miss ratio does not increase significantly.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Gerald Aigner & Urs Hölzle

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  1. Gerald Aigner
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  2. Urs Hölzle
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Pierre Cointe

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Aigner, G., Hölzle, U. (1996). Eliminating virtual function calls in C++ programs. In: Cointe, P. (eds) ECOOP ’96 — Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1098. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053060

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053060

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61439-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68570-8

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