An architecture for interpreted dynamic object-oriented languages

e code refers to the representation of bytecodes as constant C arrays that are located in sharable text segments after compilation. Interoperability, application start-up and dynamic memory usage benefit from this representation. Indexed code threading addresses the performance problem with virtual instruction mapping (i.e. loading, decoding and invoking) by using a fast threaded instruction transfer. Unlike with standard code threading, virtual machine code remains compact and executable also with a non-threaded virtual machine emulator. A further performance boost is achieved with optimal virtual instruction ordering. This technique helps to cluster the native code implementing virtual instructions so that native instruction cache performance is increased. Finally, the efficiency problem involved with dynamic method lookup is alleviated with an inline caching scheme that is applicable with constant bytecode vectors. The scheme exploits type locality similar to polymorphic inline cac