Nu: Towards a Flexible and Dynamic Aspect-Oriented Intermediate Language Model

By: Robert Dyer, Rakesh Bangalore Shivarudra Setty, and Hridesh Rajan

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Abstract

The contribution of this work is the design, implementation and evaluation of a new aspect-oriented intermediate language model that we call Nu. The primary motivation behind the design of the Nu model is to maintain the aspect-oriented design modularity in the intermediate code for the responsiveness of incremental compilers and source-level debuggers. Nu extends the object-oriented intermediate language model with two primitives: bind and remove. We demonstrate that these primitives are capable of expressing statically deployed constructs such as AspectJ’s aspect, dynamic deployment construct such as CaeserJ’s deploy as well as dynamic control flow constructs such as AspectJ’s cflow by presenting compilation techniques from high-level languages to Nu for these constructs. Moreover, these compilation techniques also serve to show that aspect-oriented design modularity is indeed preserved in the Nu intermediate code. We also present the design and implementation of a prototype extension of the Sun Hotspot virtual machine that supports the Nu model, which serves to show that it is feasible to implement Nu in a production level virtual machine. A key concern for dynamic language models is the performance overhead of their implementation. Our performance analysis results show that method dispatch time is not degraded in our prototype implementation. Also, advice dispatch time remains fairly close to the manually inlined version.

ACM Reference

Dyer, R. et al. 2007. Nu: Towards a Flexible and Dynamic Aspect-Oriented Intermediate Language Model. Technical Report #07-06. Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science.

BibTeX Reference

@techreport{dyer2007nu,
  title = {Nu: Towards a Flexible and Dynamic Aspect-Oriented Intermediate Language Model},
  author = {Dyer, Robert and Setty, Rakesh Bangalore Shivarudra and Rajan, Hridesh},
  year = {2007},
  month = {June},
  institution = {Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science},
  number = {07-06},
  abstract = {
    The contribution of this work is the design, implementation and evaluation of
    a new aspect-oriented intermediate language model that we call Nu. The primary
    motivation behind the design of the Nu model is to maintain the
    aspect-oriented design modularity in the intermediate code for the
    responsiveness of incremental compilers and source-level debuggers. Nu extends
    the object-oriented intermediate language model with two primitives: bind and
    remove. We demonstrate that these primitives are capable of expressing
    statically deployed constructs such as AspectJ’s aspect, dynamic deployment
    construct such as CaeserJ’s deploy as well as dynamic control flow constructs
    such as AspectJ’s cflow by presenting compilation techniques from high-level
    languages to Nu for these constructs. Moreover, these compilation techniques
    also serve to show that aspect-oriented design modularity is indeed preserved
    in the Nu intermediate code.

    We also present the design and implementation of a prototype extension of the
    Sun Hotspot virtual machine that supports the Nu model, which serves to show
    that it is feasible to implement Nu in a production level virtual machine. A
    key concern for dynamic language models is the performance overhead of their
    implementation. Our performance analysis results show that method dispatch
    time is not degraded in our prototype implementation. Also, advice dispatch
    time remains fairly close to the manually inlined version.
  }
}