Computer Science and Information Systems 11(1):47–68 DOI: 10.2298/CSIS130129018C JINDY: a Java library to support invokedynamic

Abstract. Java 7 has included the new invokedynamic opcode in the Java vir-tual machine. This new instruction allows the user to define method linkage at run-time. Once the link is established, the virtual machine performs its common opti-mizations, providing better runtime performance than reflection. However, this fea-ture has not been offered at the abstraction level of the Java programming language. Since the functionality of the new opcode is not provided as a library, the existing languages in the Java platform can only use it at the assembly level. For this reason, we have developed the JINDY library that offers invokedynamic to any program-ming language in the Java platform. JINDY supports three modes of use, establishing a trade-off between runtime performance and flexibility. A runtime performance and memory consumption evaluation is presented. We analyze the efficiency of JINDY compared to reflection, the MethodHandle class in Java 7 and the Dynalink li-brary. The memory and performance costs compared to the invokedynamic op-code are also measured