LARA

Accessing and Storing Variables

Local Variables

Review instructions iload and istore from JVM Spec.

Assigning indices (called slots) to local variables:

  • in which compiler phase. What information about the symbol do we need to know?
  • how to compute the indices?

Function $slot : Var \to Int$

  • maps variable ocurrence into an index (need the symbol table)

Translation Rules for Local Variables

If $x$ is local variable and we translate expression, then

\begin{equation*} [\![ x ]\!] = \textbf{iload}(slot(x)) \end{equation*}

For assignment to local variable $x=e$, we have

\begin{equation*} [\![x=e]\!] = [\![e]\!] ::: \textbf{istore}(slot(x)) \end{equation*}

Static Variables

Consult JVM Spec and see

  • getstatic
  • putstatic

as well as the section on Runtime Constant Pool.

Instance Variables (Fields)

To access these we use

  • getfield
  • putfield

Note: in a lower-level model x.f is often evaluated as mem[x + offset(f)]

  • with inheritance, offset(f) must be consistent despite the fact that we do not know exactly what the run-time class of x will be
    • this can be very tricky to implement efficiently with multiple inheritance
    • general approach: do a run-time test on the dynamic type of an object to decide how to interpret field or method access