OBJECT ORIENTED APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR ALLOCATING OBJECTS ON AN INVOCATION STACK IN A DYNAMIC COMPILATION ENVIRONMENT

An object oriented mechanism and method allow allocating Java objects on a method's invocation stack in a dynamic compilation environment under certain conditions. When a class is dynamically compiled by a just-in-time (JIT) compiler (as the program runs), one or more of its methods may create objects that may be placed on the method's invocation stack. During the compilation of the class, only the information relating to the previously-loaded classes is taken into account. After compilation, as each new class is loaded, the class is analyzed to see if loading the class might change the analysis used to allocate objects on the invocation stacks of previously-compiled methods. If so, the previous object allocations are analyzed in light of the object reference(s) in the newly loaded class, and the previous object allocations are changed from the invocation stack to the heap, if required. In this manner objects may be allocated to a method's invocation stack based on information that is available from the classes that have been loaded, and can then be changed to be allocated from the heap if information in new classes shows that the previous decision (to allocate on the invocation stack) is no longer valid.