Type inference for late binding: The SmallEiffel Compiler

Collin, Suzanne; Colnet, Dominique; Zendra, Olivier

doi:10.1007/3-540-62599-2_31

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The compilation of living code from Eiffel to C is systematic, but C files are recompiled only when they have been modified. Collin et al 1997] describe in detail those techniques and experimental results which show a clear improvement w.r.t. existing Eiffel compilers.…”

Section: · 35mentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing statically typed object-oriented programming languages

Ducournau

2011

ACM Comput. Surv.

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In statically typed object-oriented languages, message sending, or late binding, is implemented with tables often called virtual functions tables (VFT). Those tables reduce method calls to function calls, with a small fixed number of extra indirections. The overhead is more or less important, whether inheritance and subtyping are single or multiple.In this paper, we survey the various implementation schemes available in separate compilation, in the three cases of single inheritance, multiple inheritance, and single inheritance but multiple subtyping, e.g. Java. Many works have been done recently in the framework of global compilation, mostly for dynamically typed languages but also applied to the Eiffel language in the Small Eiffel compiler. We examine how global compilation can improve the implementation and propose to use global techniques-coloring and type analysis-in a separate compilation framework.

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Section: · 35mentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing statically typed object-oriented programming languages

Ducournau

2011

ACM Comput. Surv.

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“…Furthermore, our empirical study (see Section 5) shows that only 1.7% of all method changes require explicit method dispatching. The SmallEiffel compiler uses a similar mechanism to efficiently dispatch polymorphic methods [11,37] and the authors show that replacing a dynamic method call by two static method calls produces a better performance than the invokevirtual instruction on a conventional Java Virtual Machine [38].…”

Section: Dispatching Classesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aspect-based dynamic software updating

Previtali

Groß

2011

Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development

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This paper presents an approach to update object-oriented applications at run time. We introduce an update model that leverages aspect technology to express a software update as a modular unit. Although many updates remain encapsulated within a single method body, the nature of software updates is clearly crosscutting: Classes depend on each other, and if the interface of one class changes, all clients of the class are affected. We have designed and implemented an update analyzer that automatically compares two versions of a Java program and extracts the necessary updates expressed as aspects. As execution platform, we rely on an aspect-enabled virtual machine to weave the generated updating aspects at run time. The update analyzer uses only a small subset of the user-level services provided by the VM: around advice for method redefinitions as well as field and method pointcuts for single join-point selection. To validate our approach, we have conducted an empirical study on eight real-world Java applications whose versions encompass several years of development. The study shows that most updates (i.e., 98%) can be handled by the dynamic updating system and that most updates (i.e., 92%) can be extracted fully automatically or with only modest programmer intervention.

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“…In Smart Eiffel, the GNU Eiffel compiler, method tables are not used. Instead, objects are tagged by their class identifier and all polymorphic operations-particularly subtyping tests-are implemented using small dispatch trees Collin et al 1997]. However, the approach is practical only because compilation is global, hence all classes are statically known.…”

Section: Binary Tree Dispatch (Btd)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Perfect hashing as an almost perfect subtype test

Ducournau

2008

ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.

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Subtype tests are an important issue in the implementation of object-oriented programming languages. Many techniques have been proposed, but none of them perfectly fulfills the five requirements that we have identified: constant-time, linear-space, multiple inheritance, dynamic loading and inlining. In this paper, we propose a subtyping test implementation which involves a combination of usual hashtables and Cohen's display, which is a well known technique for single inheritance hierarchies. This novel approach is based on perfect hashing, i.e. an optimized and truly constant-time variant of hashing which applies to immutable hashtables. We show that the resulting technique closely meets all five requirements. Furthermore, in the framework of Java-like languages-characterized by single inheritance of classes and multiple subtyping of interfacesperfect hashing also applies to method invocation when the receiver is typed by an interface. The proposed technique is compared to some alternatives, including the proposal by Palacz and Vitek [2003]. Time-efficiency is assessed at the cycle level in the framework of Driesen's pseudo-code and the linear-space criterion is validated by statistical simulation on benchmarks consisting of large-scale class hierarchies.

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Type inference for late binding: The SmallEiffel Compiler

Cited by 17 publications

References 8 publications

Implementing statically typed object-oriented programming languages

Implementing statically typed object-oriented programming languages

Aspect-based dynamic software updating

Perfect hashing as an almost perfect subtype test

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