Pointer traversals pose significant overhead to the execution of object‐oriented programs,
since every access to an object's state requires a pointer dereference. Eliminating redundant
pointer traversals reduces both instructions executed as well as redundant memory
accesses to relieve pressure on the memory subsystem. We describe an approach to
elimination of redundant access expressions that combines partial redundancy elimination
(PRE) with type‐based alias analysis (TBAA). To explore the potential of this approach we …

xperiments demonstrate improvements in the execut ion of optimized code for several Java
benchmarks running in diverse execution environments: the standard interpreted JDK virtual
machine, a virtual machine usin g “just-in-time” compilation, and native binaries comp iled
off-line (“way-ahead-of-time”). We isolate the impact of access path PRE using TBAA, and
demonstrate t hat Java's requirement of precise exceptions can noticeab ly impact code-
motion optimizations like PRE.