Efficient implementation of Java interfaces: Invokeinterface considered harmless

  • Authors:
  • Bowen Alpern;Anthony Cocchi;Stephen Fink;David Grove

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA '01 Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Single superclass inheritance enables simple and efficient table-driven virtual method dispathc. However, virtual method table dispatch does not handle multiple inheritance and interfaces. This complication has led to a widespread misimpression that interface method dispatch is inherently inefficient. This paper argues that with proper implementation techniques, Java interfaces need not be a source of significant performance degradation.