5. Related Work 6. Conclusions and Future Work 4. Comparison of Instruction Sequences

Multiple argument dispatching is a natural extension of single-argument, or receiver-based, dispatch. Recently several techniques were proposed that aim to make multiple dispatch an efficient operation. However, none of the studies has actually analyzed run-time behavior. In this study we compare several techniques, two of which are presented for the first time, by writing down abstract assembly code call sequences. We discuss the expected instruction-level parallelism and give formulas for the critical path. This preliminary analysis gives us promising candidates for later, more rigorous experimentation.