An evaluation of automatic object inline allocation techniques

  • Authors:

  • Julian Dolby;Andrew A. Chien

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Urbana;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Object-oriented languages such as Java and Smalltalk provide a uniform object reference model, allowing objects to be conveniently shared. If implemented directly, these uniform reference models can suffer in efficiency due to additional memory dereferences and memory management operations. Automatic inline allocation of child objects within parent objects can reduce overheads of heap-allocated pointer-referenced objects.We present three compiler analyses to identify inlinable fields by tracking accesses to heap objects. These analyses span a range from local data flow to adaptive whole-program, flow-sensitive inter-procedural analysis. We measure their cost and effectiveness on a suite of moderate-sized C++ programs (up to 30,000 lines including libraries). We show that aggressive interprocedural analysis is required to enable object inlining, and our adaptive inter-procedural analysis [23] computes precise information efficiently. Object inlining eliminates typically 40% of object accesses and allocations (improving performance up to 50%). Furthermore,