We tried two approaches to handling interface calls in the presence of CTB arrays. Our first approach profiles interface calls by allocating a caller_index for a call site in the JIT compiler and generating an instruction before the call to save the index value in a known memory location. After a conflict resolution stub has found its target method, it loads the index value from the known memory location. The CTB array of the target method is loaded from the TIB array of receiver object's declaring class. The target address is read out from the CTB at the index, and finally the resolution stub jumps to the target address. This approach uses two more instructions to store and load the caller_index than invokevirtual calls. After introducing one of our optimizations in Section 2.4, inlining CTB elements into TIBs, the conflict resolution stub requires more instructions to check the range of the index value to determine if the indexed CTB element is inlined in the TIB or not.
Our second approach was to simply use dynamic CHA to build call edges for invokeinterface call sites, without introducing profiling instructions.
Since our profiling results showed that the number of call edges from invokeinterface call sites is only a small portion of all edges, we chose to use the second approach for the remaining experiments in this paper.