Message Dispatch in Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Languages (1995)
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author = {Martin Müller and Prof Bernard and M. E. Moret and Martin M Uller and Martin M Uller},
title = {Message Dispatch in Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Languages},
year = {1995}
}
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Abstract:
The efficiency of dynamically-typed object-oriented languages relies on a fast message dispatch mechanism. Since type information is absent at compile-time, message expressions can be very general. A constant time solution to this problem requires the compiler to compute a full dispatch table, i.e., a complete enumeration of all possible receiver-selector pairs. Unfortunately, the space consumption of this table is prohibitive for all practical purposes. In this report, we discuss several known implementations of the dynamic dispatch algorithm based on compression techniques of the full table and discuss their drawbacks. Our main contribution is a new algorithm for message dispatching, motivated by a static class hierarchy analysis of two commercial products, the NeXTStep 3.2 and the Objectworks 4.1 class hierarchies. We summarize the run-time performance and space requirements for our algorithm. Acknowledgements I would like to thank foremost my thesis advisor Professor Bernard M.E....
