About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Abstract
A location is said to be immutable if its value and the values of selected locations reachable from it are guaranteed to remain unchanged during a specified time interval. We introduce a framework for immutability specification, and discuss its application to code optimization. Compared with a final declaration, an immutability assertion in our framework can express a richer set of immutability properties along three dimensions - lifetime, reachability and context. We present a framework for processing and verifying immutability annotations in Java, as well as extending optimizations so as to exploit immutability information. Preliminary experimental results show that a significant number (61%) of read accesses could potentially be classified as immutable in our framework. Further, use of immutability information yields substantial reductions (33-99%) in the number of dynamic read accesses, and also measurable speedups in the range of 5-10% for certain benchmark programs. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.