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Applying Optimizations for Dynamically-typed Languages to Java

Grimmer, Matthias and Marr, Stefan and Kahlhofer, Mario and Wimmer, Christian and Würthinger, Thomas and Mössenböck, Hanspeter (2017) Applying Optimizations for Dynamically-typed Languages to Java. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Managed Languages and Runtimes. ACM-ICPS International Conference Proceeding Series . ACM, New York, USA, pp. 12-22. ISBN 978-1-4503-5340-3. (doi:10.1145/3132190.3132202) (KAR id:63809)

Abstract

While Java is a statically-typed language, some of its features make it behave like a dynamically-typed language at run time. This includes Java’s boxing of primitive values as well as generics, which rely on type erasure. This paper investigates how runtime technology for dynamically-typed languages such as JavaScript and Python can be used for Java bytecode. Using optimistic optimizations, we specialize bytecode instructions that access references in such a way, that they can handle primitive data directly and also specialize data structures in order to avoid boxing for primitive types. Our evaluation shows that these optimizations can be successfully applied to a statically-typed language such as Java and can also improve performance significantly. With this approach, we get an efficient implementation of Java's generics, avoid changes to the Java language, and maintain backwards compatibility, allowing existing code to benefit from our optimization transparently.

Item Type: Book section
DOI/Identification number: 10.1145/3132190.3132202
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science)
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Stefan Marr
Date Deposited: 05 Oct 2017 10:33 UTC
Last Modified: 09 Dec 2022 03:58 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/63809 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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