2001coots C. Dutchyn, P. Lu, D. Szafron, S. Bromling and W. Holst, Multi-Dispatch in the Java Virtual Machine: Design and Implementation, Proceedings of 6th Usenix Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS'2001), January 2001, San Antonio USA, pp. 77-92. (Best Student Paper Award) abstract or pdf.
Abstract:

Mainstream object-oriented languages, such as C++ and Java, provide only a restricted form of polymorphic methods, namely single-receiver dispatch. In common programming situations, programmers must work-around this limitation. We describe how to extend the Java Virtual Machine to support multiple-dispatch and examine the complications that Java imposes on multiple-dispatch in practice. Our technique avoids changes to the Java programming language itself, maintains source-code and library compatibility, and isolates the performance penalty and semantic changes of multiple-dispatch to the program sections which use it. We have micro-benchmark and application-level performance results for a dynamic Most Specic Applicable (MSA) dispatcher, a framework-based Single Receiver Projections (SRP) and a tuned SRP dispatcher. Our general-purpose technique provides smaller dispatch latency than programmer-written double-dispatch code with equivalent functionality.