Abstract

Class libraries are generally designed with an emphasis on versatility and extensibility. Applications that use a library typically exercise only part of the library's functionality. As a result, objects created by the application may contain unused members. We present an algorithm that specializes a class hierarchy with respect to its usage in a program P . That is, the algorithm analyzes the member access patterns for P's variables, and creates distinct classes for variables that accessdifferent members. Class hierarchy specialization reduces object size,and is hence primarily a space optimization. However, execution time may also be reduced through reduced object creation/destruction time, and caching/paging effects. 1 Introduction Class libraries are generally designed with an emphasis on versatility and extensibility. An application that uses a class library typically exercises only part of the library's functionality. Unfortunately, this leads to situations where the objects cr...

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