Customization: Optimizing Compiler Technology for SELF, a Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Programming Language (1989)
Dynamically-typed object-oriented languages please programmers, but their lack of static type information penalizes performance. Our new implementation techniques extract static type information from declaration-free programs. Our system compiles several copies of a given procedure, each customized for one receiver type, so that the type of the receiver is bound at compile time. The compiler…
The report discusses a novel implementation technique for dynamically-typed object-oriented programming languages, specifically SELF, which aims to optimize performance while retaining the flexibility of dynamically-typed languages. By extracting static type information from declaration-free programs, the compiler is able to compile several copies of a given procedure, each customized for a specific receiver type, allowing for compile-time binding of the receiver type.
The system also predicts likely types and inserts run-time type tests to verify these predictions, effectively splitting calls and compiling a customized copy for each control path. When combined with compile-time message lookup, aggressive procedure inlining, and traditional optimizations, this approach has been shown to double the performance of dynamically-typed object-oriented languages.
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