1 Introduction. - 1. 1 Polymorphism. - 1. 2 Inheritance. - 1. 3 Problem statement. - 1. 4 Overview. - 2 Polymorphic calls. - 2. 1 Basic construct. - 2. 2 Hand-crafted polymorphism. - 2. 3 Object-oriented message dispatch. - 3 Software techniques for efficient polymorphic calls. - 3. 1 Basic message dispatch in object-oriented languages. - 3. 2 Dynamic techniques. - 3. 3 Static techniques. - 3. 4 Memory cost. - 3. 5 Programming environment aspects. - 3. 6 Summary. - 4 Row displacement compression of message dispatch tables. - 4. 1 Class-based row displacement. - 4. 2 Selector-based row displacement. - 4. 3 Compression results. - 4. 4 Optimizing table compression speed. - 4. 5 interactive programming environments. - 4. 6 Summary. - 5 Analysis of dispatch sequences on modern processor architectures. - 5. 1 Parameters influencing performance. - 5. 2 Dispatch cost calculation. - 5. 3 Cost of dynamic typing and multiple inheritance. - 5. 4 Influence of processor implementation. - 5. 5 Limitations. - 5. 6 Summary. - 6 Measurement of virtual function call overhead on modern processors. - 6. 1 Virtual function tables and the thunk variant. - 6. 2 Superscalar processors. - 6. 3 Method. - 6. 4 Results. - 6. 5 Discussion. - 6. 6 Summary. - 7 Hardware techniques. - 7. 1 Software vs. hardware prediction. - 7. 2 Hardware indirect branch prediction. - 7. 3 Indirect branch frequency. - 7. 4 Experimental setup. - 7. 5 Problem statement. - 8 Basic indirect branch predictors. - 8. 1 Branch target buffer. - 8. 2 Two-level predictor. - 8. 3 History buffers. - 8. 4 history tables. - 8. 5 Summary. - 9 Hybrid indirect branch predictors. - 9. 1 Hybrid prediction. - 9. 2 Branch classification. - 9. 3 Dual-path hybrid prediction. - 9. 4 Cascaded prediction. - 9. 5 Summary. - 10 Related work. - 10. 1 Software techniques. - 10. 2 Polymorphic calls in Java. - 10. 3 Hardware techniques. - 11 Conclusions. - 12 Glossary. - 13 References. - Appendix A Polymorphic call sequences in assembly. - Appendix B Indirect branch execution intervals. - Appendix C Basic prediction accuracy per benchmark. Language: English