Tokenisation and Compression of Java Class Files

Method calls in object oriented languages, such as Java, are bound at run-time, making the method binding technique very important for the performance of the language. Efficient implementations can rely on having additional memory and/or processing power available either to store lookup tables or to allow for the construction of caches or rewriting of instructions during runtime. These are luxuries not always available on mobile devices such as mobile phones, tablets, etc. In this paper we describe a novel way of tokenising and compressing method dispatch tables to provide an efficient dispatch process which could be implemented in hardware in only a few operations. We demonstrate this in the context of Java, also showing a significant reduction in size for the resulting class files.