Just-in-Time Data Structures

Mattias de Wael (1) , Stefan Marr (2) , Joeri de Koster (1) , Jennifer B. Sartor (1) , Wolfgang de Meuter (1)

1 SLL - Software Languages Lab
2 RMOD - Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution

Today, software engineering practices focus on finding the single right data representation (i.e., data structure) for a program. The right data representation, however, might not exist: relying on a single representation of the data for the lifetime of the program can be suboptimal in terms of performance. We explore the idea of developing data structures for which changing the data representation is an intrinsic property. To this end we introduce Just-in-Time Data Structures, which enable representation changes at runtime, based on declarative input from a performance expert programmer. Just-in-Time Data Structures are an attempt to shift the focus from finding the ``right’’ data structure to finding the right sequence of data representations. We present JitDS-Java, an extension to the Java language, to develop Just-in-Time Data Structures. Further, we show two example programs that benefit from changing the representation at runtime.

Mots clés: Algorithms; Data Structures; Dynamic Reclassification; Optimizations; Performance

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Mattias de Wael, Stefan Marr, Joeri de Koster, Jennifer B. Sartor, Wolfgang de Meuter. Just-in-Time Data Structures. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming & Software, Oct 2015, Pittsburgh, PA, United States. ⟨10.1145/2814228.2814231⟩. ⟨hal-01205343⟩