A study on the resolution of overloaded Java methods with polymorphic arguments

Abstract

The study of the technology of polymorphism implemented in Java was carried out - the resolution of an overloaded method at the compile-time in the case of passing polymorphic objects as arguments to it, the type of which becomes known only at run-time. The possibility of the compiler and the Java runtime execution choosing a method not foreseen by the developer is demonstrated on an example, and a solution is proposed for correcting the resolution by type casting of the argument to the required (actual) type. A solution is given, which allows to reduce the number of overloaded methods with the same implementation thanks to the combined use of static resolution of an overloaded method and dynamic selection of an overridden method. Emphasis is placed on the possible decrease in code quality due to a large number of branches when using the proposed solution in the case of a large number of overloaded methods with different implementations. As a solution for this case, it is proposed to use Java reflection tools to determine the actual type of the argument and call the necessary overloaded method. For the given example, the dependence of the program execution time on the number of overloaded methods invokes was investigated for the solution without the use of reflection and with its use