Towards Compile-Time Optimisations for Persistence

We consider how a persistent programming language might offer performance competitive with that of non-persistent languages, at least on memory resident data. We are concerned with object-oriented languages, and with implementing persistence via object faulting, where the system detects uses of non-resident objects and fetches them on demand. We present some background on object faulting and means for implementing it, and describe a specific language we are developing, namely Persistent Modula-3. Then we explore approaches to optimising persistence aspects of Persistent Modula-3, and outline techniques under consideration in our compiler development effort.