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Each klass structure already includes (allocated inline) a 2-dimensional ragged table of its statically defined interfaces. The spine of the table has pairs, <oop iklass, offset_t itable>. The spine is terminated by a tuple <NULL, 0>.. The itable offsets are relative to the enclosing klass (the receiver type).

Wiki MarkupEach itable is an array of the form {{methodOop target\[N]}}, where {{N}} is the number of methods in the interface.

Interface dispatch (for polymorphic call sites) searches the spine of the table, and dips into the matching itable, picking out the target method corresponding to the index (in 0..N-1) of the abstract method in the interface.

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The meth.patch code already uses the oop-in-a-constant-pool technique for autogenerated MethodHandle.invoke methods (of which there is an infinite variety).

Design decisions and considerations

• The need to be able to do dynamic invocations in <clinit> of an interface is less than minimal. It should be safe to reuse the _bootstrap_method oop in instanceKlass for storing the injector for injectable interfaces.
• The injector for an injectable interface is defined by the <clinit> method on the injectable interface. This is done by invoking InterfaceInjector.setInjector(InterfaceInjector) from <clinit>.
• How should an interface be marked as injectable? Options include:
  • Adding a flag that marks an interface as injectable. The following flags have no meaning for classes yet:
    • 0x0040 - JVM_ACC_VOLATILE for fields, JVM_ACC_BRIDGE for methods
    • 0x0080 - JVM_ACC_TRANSIENT for fields, JVM_ACC_VARARGS for methods
    • 0x0100 - JVM_ACC_NATIVE for methods
  • Adding an injectable annotation to the class file, and make sure that this annotation gets loaded early enough.
  • Eagerly load all interfaces. The interfaces that define an injector during class initialization are defined as injectable.
    • To reduce the need for eager loading the constant pool could be scanned to determine if the interface references the setInjector-method.

Other tricky parts

Retry path for invokeinterface

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This needs a linked list search and a whole new negative logic side. As with invokeinterface, if the initial searches fail, there needs to be a backoff and upcall to the JVM, to possibly inject the interface. Since negative interface checks are too common to handle this way (via an upcall) some negative filtering needs to be put in. We could do it in a couple of ways:

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• Interface klasses which are not injectable (the vast majority) should have bits in their header which identifies them as such, so that instanceof can return false more quickly. A good way to do this may be to add a second {{Klass::secondary_super_cache}} just for injectable interfaces; then the secondary_super_offset for an interface will take one of two distinct values (instead of the single value it takes today), depending on which secondary_super_cache it uses. This simultaneously makes it easy to detect injectables (by {{secondary_super_offset == offsetof(&secondary_super_cache\[1]))}} and also allocates a word in every {{klass}} to optimize the lookup of injected interfaces.
• (Can delay this for the POC.) Introduce a negative super type cache: Klass::secondary_non_super_cache. Use it as a first resort, to avoid upcalls on negative type tests of injectables.

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If two types are related by inheritance, it may be best to query supertypes before subtypes. (But never Object.)

Compile-time optimizations

If interfaces are marked as being injectable or not, then the JIT would not have to emit the code for looking up the interface in the extension list if it's not injectable. To do this
the method that emits the instructions needs to have access to the klass representing the interface; this needs to be done through the ciKlass API.

Customizing code like that is usually only done by the JIT's optimizer. (Esp. the server JIT.) The interpreter can usually afford (until proven otherwise!) to use the most generic code sequences.

There are five places where interface types must be checked by the JIT:

1. invokeinterface
2. instanceof
3. checkcast
4. checkcast implicit in aastore checks
5. reflective versions of 1, 2, or 3.

In cases 1, 3, and 4, there is no strong need to customize for non-injectable interfaces, because the cost of failure is always an expensive exception, so it doesn't matter if you did a useless check of the extension records.

In case 2, there is definitely a need for a negative supertype cache in class Klass.

In case 5, if there is a JIT intrinsic which folds the reflective idiom to a non-reflective one, then it can be reduced to one of the previous cases (1,2,3). Otherwise, it is probably slow, and can be treated in full generality all the time. A possible exception is that the negative supertype cache should be consulted for reflective instanceof.

Cases 4 and 5 are interesting in that the interface type being tested against is non-constant (aastore checks against a varying array element type). In those cases, you either use full generality all the time, or use both code sequences, selected by a dynamic test for injectability.

Bottom line, per case:
1. always check for extension records
2. always use the negative cache (after fast positive tests), and customize the code in the JIT (GraphKit::gen_subtype_check)
3. customize in the JIT; negative cache buys nothing
4. customize in the JIT if possible; negative cache buys nothing
5. let the JIT do its thing for intrinsics; use the negative cache for Class.isInstance and Class.isAssignableFrom

References

• http://blogs.sunoracle.com/jrose/entry/interface_injection_in_the_vm^{Image Removed}
• http://journal.thobe.org/2008/07/my-jvm-whishlist-pt-1-interface.html^{Image Removed}