reducing indirect function call overhead in c++ programs
Modern computer architectures increasingly depend on mechanisms that estimate future control flow decisions to increase performance. Mechanisms such as speculative execution and prefetching are becoming standard architectural mechanisms that rely on control flow prediction to prefetch and speculatively execute future instructions. At the same time, computer programmers are increasingly turning to object-oriented languages to increase their productivity. These languages commonly use run time dispatching to implement object polymorphism. Dispatching is usually implemented using an indirect function call, which presents challenges to existing control flow prediction techniques. We have measured the occurrence of indirect function calls in a collection of C++ programs. We show that, although it is more important to predict branches accurately, indirect call prediction is also an important factor in some programs and will grow in importance with the growth of object-oriented programming. We examine the improvement offered by compile-time optimizations and static and dynamic prediction techniques, and demonstrate how compilers can use existing branch prediction mechanisms to improve performance in C++ programs. Using these methods with the programs we examined, the number of instructions between mispredicted breaks in control can be doubled on existing computers.
functional program computer architecture computation architecture estimates future control flow control flow performance prefetching standardization predict instruction timing programmer object language product use polymorphic challenge collect factor compilation optimization dynamic demonstrate branch prediction method profile-based optimization object oriented programming customization object oriented language