Whole-Program Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages


Craig Chambers, Jeffrey Dean, and David Grove
We describe Vortex, an optimizing compiler intended to produce high-quality code for programs written in a heavily-object-oriented style. To achieve this end, Vortex includes a number of intra- and interprocedural static analyses that can exploit knowledge about the whole program being compiled, including intraprocedural class analysis, class hierarchy analysis, and exhaustive class testing, and profile-guided optimizations such as receiver class prediction and selective specialization. To make whole-program optimization practical, Vortex automatically tracks cross-file optimization dependencies at a fine granularity, triggering selective recompilation of affected compiled files whenever the source program changes. Empirical measurements of five purely object-oriented benchmark programs written in Cecil, ranging in size from several hundred to 75,000 lines of source code, indicate that these optimization techniques improve performance of large programs by more than a factor of three over a system with only intraprocedural static optimizations. Vortex is written in Cecil, and it has been used as its own compiler and optimizer during its development for the past two years. Vortex's optimizations and implementation techniques should be useful for any language or program where optimizations to reduce the cost of polymorphism are important, including object-oriented languages (we are currently adding front-ends for C++, Modula-3, and Java to Vortex to study its effectiveness on these other language styles) and other high-level symbolic, functional, and logic languages.

Note: This document is 70 pages long.


University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technical Report UW-CSE-96-06-02.

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Cecil/Vortex Project