Making Pure Object-Oriented Languages Practical

Abstract

In the past, object-oriented language designers and programmers have been forced to choose between pure message passing and performance. Last year, our SELF system achieved close to half the speed of optimized C but suffered from impractically long compile times. Two new optimization techniques, deferred compilation of uncommon cases and non-backtracking splitting using path objects, have improved compilation speed by more than an order of magnitude. SELF now compiles about as fast as an optimizing C compiler and runs at over half the speed of optimized C. This new level of performance may make pure object-oriented languages practical. 1 Introduction In the past, object-oriented language designers and programmers have been forced to choose between purity and performance. In a pure object-oriented language, all computation, even low-level operations like variable accessing, arithmetic, and array indexing, is performed by sending messages to objects. Although a message send may cost o...