Hardware supported object management and communication enhancement schemes for an object-oriented computing system

Abstract

Java is a successful OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) language, popular in Internet, mobile, and other applications. It inherits advantages of OOP and contains enhancements in security, portability and reusability. Java adapts automatic memory management, and therefore the risk of memory misuse is reduced. However, the traditional computing systems are mainly targeted to procedural programming. Java program performance is notoriously poor due to the lack of support of hardware and the extra software overheads needed to handle the OOP features. To meet the performance requirements for OOP, the processor jHISC is proposed. jHISC is a Java processor based on High-level Instruction Set Computer (HISC) architecture which supports OOP features in hardware level. Comparing with von Neumann computing system, jHISC enhances the security of memory access and improves the OOP performance significantly. jHISC uses a hardware readable data structure, and Operand Descriptor Table to describe objects in Java. An Operand Descriptor Table is constructed by a set of Operand Descriptors (OD) and each OD stores the field information of an object. However, the advantages of OD are not fully utilized in jHISC. By applying the benefits of OD, further enhancements to access control, code execution, object management and other supporting can be provided. Several improvement schemes are investigated in this thesis in order to enhance the Java support in jHISC.