article

Design and implementation of generics for the .NET Common language runtime

Authors:

Andrew Kennedy,

Don SymeAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 36, Issue 5

Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/381694.378797

Published: 01 May 2001 Publication History

Abstract

The Microsoft.NET Common Language Runtime provides a shared type system, intermediate language and dynamic execution environment for the implementation and inter-operation of multiple source languages. In this paper we extend it with direct support for parametric polymorphism (also known as generics), describing the design through examples written in an extended version of the C# programming language, and explaining aspects of implementation by reference to a prototype extension to the runtime.

Our design is very expressive, supporting parameterized types, polymorphic static, instance and virtual methods, “F-bounded” type parameters, instantiation at pointer and value types, polymorphic recursion, and exact run-time types. The implementation takes advantage of the dynamic nature of the runtime, performing just-in-time type specialization, representation-based code sharing and novel techniques for efficient creation and use of run-time types.

Early performance results are encouraging and suggest that programmers will not need to pay an overhead for using generics, achieving performance almost matching hand-specialized code.

References

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The .NET Common Language Runtime. See website at http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/.

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Motara YHung CCerny TShin DBechini A(2020)A structural modeling notation for the typed functional paradigmProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3341105.3373863(1515-1522)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2020
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Shabalin DOdersky MErdweg SOliveira B(2018)Interflow: interprocedural flow-sensitive type inference and method duplicationProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Scala10.1145/3241653.3241660(61-71)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2018
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Springer MKrieger AManilov SMasuhara H(2017)dart2javaProceedings of the 12th Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems10.1145/3098572.3098575(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2017
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Index Terms

Design and implementation of generics for the .NET Common language runtime
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Runtime environments
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 36, Issue 5

May 2001

330 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/381694

Issue’s Table of Contents

PLDI '01: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation
June 2001
331 pages
ISBN:1581134142
DOI:10.1145/378795
Chairmen:
Michael Burke
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
,
Mary Lou Soffa
Univ. of Pittsburgh

Copyright © 2001 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 May 2001

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 36, Issue 5

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Cited By

Motara YHung CCerny TShin DBechini A(2020)A structural modeling notation for the typed functional paradigmProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3341105.3373863(1515-1522)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341105.3373863
Shabalin DOdersky MErdweg SOliveira B(2018)Interflow: interprocedural flow-sensitive type inference and method duplicationProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Scala10.1145/3241653.3241660(61-71)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3241653.3241660
Springer MKrieger AManilov SMasuhara H(2017)dart2javaProceedings of the 12th Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems10.1145/3098572.3098575(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3098572.3098575
Ducournau RPagès JPrivat JZheng YBinder WTůma P(2016)Preexistence and concrete type analysis in the context of multiple inheritanceProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools10.1145/2972206.2972207(1-12)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2016
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Gyori AShi AHariri FMarinov DYoung MXie T(2015)Reliable testing: detecting state-polluting tests to prevent test dependencyProceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2771783.2771793(223-233)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2015
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Zhang YLoring MSalvaneschi GLiskov BMyers AGrove DBlackburn S(2015)Lightweight, flexible object-oriented genericsProceedings of the 36th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/2737924.2738008(436-445)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2015
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Alagić SAlagić S(2015)Type SystemsObject-Oriented Technology10.1007/978-3-319-20442-0_4(81-104)Online publication date: 2015
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Ducournau R(2011)Implementing statically typed object-oriented programming languagesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/1922649.192265543:3(1-48)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2011
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