Meeting C++ 2024 - A deep dive into dispatching techniques

Jonathan Müller

On Day 3 at 16:00 (CET/Berlin) in Track B [Opal Room and online]

At the core of an interpreter is a loop that iterates over instructions and executes them in order. This requires dispatching: based on the current instruction, it needs to select different code. A fast interpreter requires a fast instruction dispatcher, but so does everything else that needs to switch over a fixed set of different options.

This talk investigates at various dispatching techniques, from virtual functions over simple switch statements to jump tables. We'll look at performance analysis tools, benchmarks, and lots and lots of assembly code, in order to learn ways to trick the compiler into generating the assembly code that we actually want.

Even if you don't need to actually write an interpreter or other dispatcher, you will learn a lot about optimization.

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