Quantifying and evaluating the space overhead for alternative C++ memory layouts

This paper develops a formalism that precisely characterizes when class tables are required for C++ memory layouts. A memory layout is a particular choice of data structures for implementing run‐time support for object‐oriented languages. We use this formalism to quantify and evaluate, on a set of b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Software, practice & experience Vol. 33; no. 7; pp. 595 - 636
Main Authors: Sweeney, Peter F., Burke, Michael
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.06.2003
Subjects:
C++
object-oriented optimizations
programming language implementation
ISSN:0038-0644, 1097-024X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper develops a formalism that precisely characterizes when class tables are required for C++ memory layouts. A memory layout is a particular choice of data structures for implementing run‐time support for object‐oriented languages. We use this formalism to quantify and evaluate, on a set of benchmarks, the space overhead for a set of C++ memory layouts. In particular, this paper studies the space overhead due to three language features: virtual dispatch, virtual inheritance, and dynamic typing. To date, there has been no scientific quantification or evaluation of C++ memory layouts. Our approach can help C++ implementors. This work has already influenced the memory layout design choices in IBM's Visual Age C++ V5 compiler. Applying our approach to a set of five benchmarks, we demonstrate that the impact of object‐oriented space overhead can vary dramatically between applications (ranging from 0.42% to 99.79% for our benchmarks). In particular, applications whose object space is dominated by instances of classes that heavily use object‐oriented language features will be significantly impacted by the choice of a memory layout. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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ISSN:0038-0644
1097-024X
DOI:10.1002/spe.519