ALCOMFT-TR-02-76

Stephen Alstrup, Gerth Stølting Brodal, Inge Li Gørtz and Theis Rauhe
Time and Space Efficient Multi-Method Dispatching
Århus. Work package 4. May 2002.

Abstract: The dispatching problem for object oriented languages is the problem of determining the most specialized method to invoke for calls at run-time. This can be a critical component of execution performance. A number of recent results, including [Muthukrishnan and Müller SODA'96, Ferragina and Muthukrishnan ESA'96, Alstrup et al. FOCS'98], have studied this problem and in particular provided various efficient data structures for the mono-method dispatching problem. A recent paper of Ferragina, Muthukrishnan and de Berg [STOC'99] addresses the multi-method dispatching problem.

Our main result is a linear space data structure for binary dispatching that supports dispatching in logarithmic time. Using the same query time as Ferragina et al., this result improves the space bound with a logarithmic factor.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-02-76.ps.gz (176 kb).