Towards automatic specialization of java programs

Abstract

Automatic program specialization can derive efficient implementations from generic components, thus reconciling the often opposing goals of genericity and efficiency. This technique has proved useful within the domains of imperative, functional, and logical languages, but so far has not been explored within the domain of object-oriented languages. We present experiments in the specialization of Java programs. We demonstrate how to construct a program specializer for Java programs from an existing specializer for C programs and a Java-to-C compiler. Specialization is managed using a declarative approach that abstracts over the optimization process and masks implementation details. Our experiments show that program specialization provides a four-time speedup of an image-filtering program. Based on these experiments, we identify optimizations of object-oriented programs that can be carried out by automatic program specialization. We argue that program specialization is useful in the field of software components, allowing a generic component to be specialized to a specific configuration.