Patent ID: 7082597

Claim:
A computer readable medium stored in a computer system including computer program code for representing an object of an object-based programming environment as an object representation inside a virtual machine, wherein said object representation is suitable for use by said virtual machine, said object representation comprising a first reference, a second reference, and a hash key, and said computer readable medium comprising: computer program code for allocating said first reference to an internal class representation inside said virtual machine, wherein said internal class representation is a representation inside said virtual machine for a class (or class file) of said object of said object-based programming environment, wherein said internal class representation describes one or more methods associated with said object and wherein said first reference is used to invoke said one or more methods; computer program code for allocating said second reference to instance fields of said object which is represented by said object representation inside said virtual machine, wherein said second reference is used to access one or more instance fields of said object at runtime; computer program code for storing a hash key that is used to identify the object, wherein said hash key is the memory address of said first reference; wherein said second reference is a reference to an array of references that references each of said instance fields of said object, wherein each reference in said array of references is a reference to an instance field of said object, and wherein each of said instance fields is accessed by indexing said array of references; and wherein said internal class representation includes a header of a predetermined size, and wherein a method table associated with said object is allocated immediately after said header.