Multi-Method Dispatch Using Single-Receiver Projections Wade Holst Duane Szafron Candy Pang Yuri Leontiev g fwade,duane,candy,yuri @cs.ualberta.ca Department of Computing Science University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada Abstract A new technique for multi-method dispatch, called Single-Receiver Projections and abbre- viated SRP, is presented. It operates by performing projections onto single-receiver dispatch tables, and thus benefits from existing research into single-receiver dispatch techniques. It pro- k vides method dispatch in O(k ), where is the arity of the method. Unlike existing multi-method dispatch techniques, it also maintains the set of all applicable methods. This extra information allows SRP to support languages like CLOS that use next-method. SRP is also highly incremen- tal in nature, so it is well-suited for languages that require separate compilation and languages that allow methods and classes to be added at run-time. SRP uses less data-structure memory than all existing multi-method techniques and has the second fastest dispatch time. Furthermore, if the other techniques are extended to support all applicable methods, SRP becomes the fastest dispatch techniques. RESEARCH PAPER Subject Areas: language design and implementation, programming environments Keywords: multi-method, dispatch, object-oriented, implementation, compiler Word Count: 8722 Contact Author: Duane Szafron Department of Computing Science University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada, T6G 2H1 Phone: (780) 492-5468 Fax: (780) 492-1071 Email:
[email protected] 1 1 Introduction In object-oriented languages, the method to invoke is determined not only by the method (selector) name, but also by the dynamic types of its arguments.