Patent ID: 7987473

Claim:
A method of determining a class of an object, including: obtaining a pointer of the object, where the pointer points to the object; extracting from the pointer one or more bits that are not implemented as address bits; interpreting the one or more bits as an identifier of the class of the object; determining the class of the object to correspond to the identifier; accessing information in a class structure of the class of the object without loading the object; and handling a virtual method call by using inline caches; wherein handling the virtual method call by using inline caches includes determining a prediction class that is a likely class of the object associated with the virtual method call and statically jumping execution to a determined address if the prediction class matches the class of the object; wherein determining the prediction class and the determined address includes using a class and an address associated with a previous virtual call; wherein if the prediction class is not the class of the object, using a virtual method table associated with the extracted bits to determine an address of a method associated with the virtual method call.