Microarchitectural and Compile-Time Optimizations for Performance Improvement of Procedural and Object-Oriented Languages

Applications, and their associated programming models, have had a profound influence on computer archi-tecture evolution. Programs developed in procedural languages (e.g., C and fortran) have traditionally served this role. The popularity of the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm has been growing rapidly, especially through the use of languages such as C++ and Java. OOP languages support the concepts of data encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance, which promise to increase code reuse and result in more reliable code. Applications developed in object oriented languages exhibit different execution behavior compared to their procedural language counterparts. We focus our work on two primary differences encountered as we move to applications developed in OO languages: i) the increased number of procedures and their higher calling frequencies, and ii) the increased use of indirect branches. Equipped with a set of C and C++ benchmark applications, we propose microarchitectural mechanisms and compiler optimizations to alleviate performance bottlenecks presented by both programming models. We perform our evaluation in the context of multiple-issue, dynamically scheduled, microprocessors, and their associated memory hierarchies. To improve procedure layout on the memory space, we propose a graph-based model that exploits tempora