Whole program analysis of Java programs for virtual calls and exception handling

Java Programs suffer performance degradation due to the presence of virtual calls and the lack of an efficient exception handling mechanism. In this dissertation, we show how virtual calls can be statically resolved to one or two target methods. The resolved calls can then be potentially inlined and hence improve the performance of the program. Analyzing the whole program (including the Java runtime library) instead of only user code has a positive effect on the performance of the program. We present two exception handling mechanisms, Direct Path Analysis and Display Catch Exception Handling, that improve the performance of programs as compared to the existing popular techniques, Stack Unwinding and Stack Cutting. The first analysis shows that the number of the stack frames needed to be unwound is lower in our analysis than Stack Unwinding. In the second analysis, we propose the Display Catch Exception Handling mechanism which is better than Stack Cutting in terms of operations required to catch exceptions.