This paper describes a new compilation technique called semantic inlining. Unlike traditional lexical inlining, which only incorporates a lexical representation of a method into the calling context, semantic inlining incorporates into the calling context semantic information about the method and its class. This is accomplished by treating selected classes and methods, which are crucial to performance, as primitive data types and primitive operations on those data types. We show that, in our numerical benchmarks which use complex numbers and multidimensional arrays, semantic inlining yields speedups of between 35 and 81, delivering performance between 65% to 90% of Fortran. The speed and effectiveness of semantic inlining make it practical for both static and dynamic compilers, and make it an effective technique for extending the primitive data types and operations of the Java programming language without altering the Java Virtual Machine specification.
By: Peng Wu, Sam Midkiff, José Moreira, Manish Gupta
Published in: RC21313 in 1998
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