gperf is a "software-tool generating-tool" designed to automate the generation of perfect hash functions. This paper describes the features, algorithms, and object-oriented design and implementation strategies incorporated in gperf.Italso presents the results from an empirical comparison between gperf-generated recognizers and other popular techniques for reserved word lookup. gperf is distributed with the GNU libg++ library and is used to generate the keyword recognizers for the GNU C and GNU C++ compilers. 1 Introduction Perfect hash functions are a time and space efficient implementation of static search sets, which are ADTs with operations like initialize, insert,andretrieve. Static search sets are common in system software applications. Typical static search sets include compiler and interpreter reserved words, assembler instruction mnemonics, and shell interpreter builtin commands. Search set elements are called keywords.Key- words are inserted into the set once, usually at c...

To support the quality of service (QoS) requirements of embedded multimedia applications, such as real-time audio and video, electronic mail and fax, and Internet telephony, off-theshelf middleware like CORBAmust be flexible, efficient, and predictable. Moreover, stringent memory constraints imposed by embedded system hardware necessitates a minimal footprint for middleware that supports multimedia applications. This paper provides three contributions towards developing efficient ORB middleware to support embedded multimedia applications. First, we describe the optimization principle patterns used to develop a time- and space-efficient CORBA Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) interpreter for TAO, which is our high-performance, real-time ORB. Second, we describe the optimizations applied to TAO's IDL compiler to generate efficient and small stubs/skeletons used in TAO's IIOP protocol engine. Third, we empirically compare the performance and memory footprint of interpretive (de)marshaling versus...