Compact Dispatch Tables for Dynamically Typed Programming Languages

Message passing is a crucial feature of any object-oriented language implementation. Even more so in dynamically typed languages, where the absence of compile-time type information forces the implementation to perform run-time type checking at each message send. Traditional techniques for the implementation of message passing in those languages favor flexibility and space efficiency over speed. This paper explores an alternative called compact dispatch tables suited to environments with high requirements in time and space efficiency. Compact dispatch tables are one solution to achieve fast, and constant-time, message passing in dynamically typed languages and to bring them one step closer to the efficiency of statically typed languages