Supporting dynamic aspect-oriented features

By: Robert Dyer and Hridesh Rajan

Abstract

Aspect-oriented programming techniques extend object-oriented programming with new methods to modularize concerns that otherwise would be non-modular. For example, logging concerns are typically scattered across a system but using aspect-oriented techniques they can be localized into a single high-level module. These techniques typically take modular high-level code and statically transform it into non-modular intermediate code. The contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a flexible and dynamic intermediate-language (IL) model. The main motivation for the design of this IL model is to support a variety of dynamic aspect-oriented language constructs that are proposed in recent literature such as CaeserJ’s deploy, history-based pointcuts, and control flow constructs. Our IL model provides a higher level of abstraction compared to traditional object-oriented ILs as a compilation target for such constructs, which makes it easier to provide efficient implementations of these constructs. We demonstrate these benefits by providing an industrial strength implementation for our IL model, by showing translation strategies from dynamic source-level constructs to our improved IL, and by analyzing the performance of the resulting IL code. Our evaluation using the SPEC JVM98 and Java Grande benchmarks shows that the overhead of supporting a dynamic deployment model can be reduced to as little as 1.5%, when compared to the unmodified VM.

ACM Reference

Dyer, R. and Rajan, H. 2010. Supporting dynamic aspect-oriented features. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 20, 2 (2010), 7:1–7:34. https://doi.org/10.1145/1824760.1824764.

BibTeX Reference

@article{Dyer2008,
  author = {Robert Dyer and Hridesh Rajan},
  title = {Supporting dynamic aspect-oriented features},
  journal = {{ACM} Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.},
  volume = {20},
  number = {2},
  pages = {7:1--7:34},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.1145/1824760.1824764},
  abstract = {
  Aspect-oriented programming techniques extend object-oriented programming with
  new methods to modularize concerns that otherwise would be non-modular. For
  example, logging concerns are typically scattered across a system but using
  aspect-oriented techniques they can be localized into a single high-level
  module. These techniques typically take modular high-level code and statically
  transform it into non-modular intermediate code.

  The contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a flexible and
  dynamic intermediate-language (IL) model. The main motivation for the design of
  this IL model is to support a variety of dynamic aspect-oriented language
  constructs that are proposed in recent literature such as CaeserJ's deploy,
  history-based pointcuts, and control flow constructs. Our IL model provides a
  higher level of abstraction compared to traditional object-oriented ILs as a
  compilation target for such constructs, which makes it easier to provide
  efficient implementations of these constructs. We demonstrate these benefits by
  providing an industrial strength implementation for our IL model, by showing
  translation strategies from dynamic source-level constructs to our improved IL,
  and by analyzing the performance of the resulting IL code. Our evaluation using
  the SPEC JVM98 and Java Grande benchmarks shows that the overhead of supporting
  a dynamic deployment model can be reduced to as little as ~1.5%, when compared
  to the unmodified VM.},
}