Principled software microengineering

• Overview of machine level issues in high level programming.
• Object oriented implementation can incur major overhead.
• Performance data for OO and primitive implementation of the GLL algorithm.

Object oriented and pattern based metaphors for software present a solid engineering base for software understanding and construction, but sometimes impose a high performance overhead. We quantify this overhead for one form of generalised parsing and propose support for implementation facets in high level programming languages.