More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

Article

Reflective program generation with patterns

Authors:

Manuel Fähndrich,

Michael Carbin,

James R. LarusAuthors Info & Claims

GPCE '06: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering

Pages 275 - 284

https://doi.org/10.1145/1173706.1173748

Published: 22 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Runtime reflection facilities, as present in Java and .NET, are powerful mechanisms for inspecting existing code and metadata, as well as generating new code and metadata on the fly. Such power does come at a high price though. The runtime reflection support in Java and .NET imposes a cost on all programs, whether they use reflection or not, simply by the necessity of keeping all metadata around and the inability to optimize code because of future possible code changes. A second---often overlooked---cost is the difficulty of writing correct reflection code to inspect or emit new metadata and code and the risk that the emitted code is not well-formed.In this paper we examine a subclass of problems that can be addressed using a simpler mechanism than runtime reflection, which we call compile-time reflection. We argue for a high-level construct called a transform that allows programmers to write inspection and generation code in a pattern matching and template style, avoiding at the same time the complexities of reflection APIs and providing the benefits of staged compilation in that the generated code and metadata is known to be well-formed and type safe ahead of time.

References

[1]

Partition III: CIL Instruction Set. ECMA Standard 335 http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm.

[2]

American National Standards Institute. ANSI/ISO/IEC 9899-1999: Programming Languages --- C. American National Standards Institute, 1430 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA, 1999.

[3]

Don Chamberlin. XQuery: A Query Language for XML. In SIGMOD '03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, pages 682--682, New York, NY, USA, 2003. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[4]

Shigeru Chiba. A metaobject protocol for C++. In ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA'95), SIGPLAN Notices 30(10), pages 285--299, Austin, Texas, USA, October 1995.

Digital Library

[5]

Dirk Draheim, Christof Lutteroth, and Gerald Weber. A type system for reflective program generators. In Glück and Lowry {7}, pages 327--341.

Digital Library

[6]

Steven Ganz, Amr Sabry, and Walid Taha. Macros as multi-stage computations: Type-safe, generative, binding macros in MacroML. In the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP '01), Florence, Italy, September 2001.

Digital Library

[7]

Robert Glück and Michael R. Lowry, editors. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, volume 3676 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, September 2005.

[8]

Maurice Herlihy. SXM: C\# Software Transactional Memory. http://www.cs.brown.edu/~mph/SXM/, May 2005.

[9]

J. Hook and T. Sheard. A semantics of compile-time reflection. Technical Report 93-019, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Oregon Graduate Institute, 1993.

[10]

Haruo Hosoya, Alain Frisch, and Giuseppe Castagna. Parametric polymorphism for XML. In POPL '05: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, pages 50--62, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[11]

Shan Shan Huang, David Zook, and Yannis Smaragdakis. Statically safe program generation with SafeGen. In Glück and Lowry {7}, pages 309--326.

Digital Library

[12]

Galen Hunt, James Larus, Martín Abadi, Mark Aiken, Paul Barham, Manuel Fähndrich, Chris Hawblitzel, Orion Hodson, Steven Levi, Nick Murphy, Bjarne Steensgaard, David Tarditi, Ted Wobber, and Brian Zill. An Overview of the Singularity Project. Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-135, Microsoft Research, 2005.

[13]

Sam Kamin. Routine run-time code generation. In Proceedings of 2003 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA'03), pages 208--220, October 2003.

Digital Library

[14]

Andrew Kennedy and Don Syme. Design and Implementation of Generics for the .NET Common Language Runtime. In PLDI '01: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 1--12, 2001.

Digital Library

[15]

Gregor Kiczales, Erik Hilsdale, Jim Hugunin, Mik Kersten, Jeffrey Palm, and William G. Griswold. An overview of AspectJ. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2072:327--355, 2001.

Digital Library

[16]

Gregor Kiczales, John Lamping, Anurag Menhdhekar, Chris Maeda, Cristina Lopes, Jean-Marc Loingtier, and John Irwin. Aspect-oriented programming. In Mehmet Akşit and Satoshi Matsuoka, editors, Proceedings European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, volume 1241, pages 220--242. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York, 1997.

[17]

Gregor Kiczales and Jim Des Rivieres. The Art of the Metaobject Protocol. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1991.

Digital Library

[18]

Xavier Leroy. A modular module system. Journal of Functional Programming, 10(3):269--303, 2000.

Digital Library

[19]

Emir Pašalić, Walid Taha, and Tim Sheard. Tagless staged interpreters for typed languages. In the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP '02), Pittsburgh, USA, October 2002.

Digital Library

[20]

Massimiliano Poletto, Wilson C. Hsieh, Dawson R. Engler, and M. Frans Kaashoek. `C and tcc: A language and compiler for dynamic code generation. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 21(2):324--369, March 1999.

Digital Library

[21]

Michael Spear, Tom Roeder, Orion Hodson, Galen Hunt, and Steven Levi. Solving the Starting Problem: Device Drivers as Self-Describing Artifacts. In Proceedings of the Eurosys 2006 Conference, pages 45--57, Leuven, Belgium, April 2006. ACM.

Digital Library

[22]

W. Taha and T. Sheard. Multi-stage programming with explicit annotations. In Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 1997, pages 203--217. New York: ACM, 1997.

Digital Library

[23]

Walid Taha. A sound reduction semantics for untyped CBN multi-stage computation. Or, the theory of MetaML is non-trivial. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation (PEPM), Boston, 2000.

Digital Library

[24]

Malte Appeltauer Tobias Rho, Günter Kniesel. Fine-grained generic aspects, workshop on foundations of aspect-oriented languages (foal'06), aosd 2006. Workshop on Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages (FOAL'06), in conjunction with Fifth International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD.06), March 20-24, 2006, Bonn, Germany, Mar 2006.

Cited By

Caires LToninho B(2019)Refinement kinds: type-safe programming with practical type-level computationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605573:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360557
Smaragdakis YBiboudis AFourtounis G(2017)Structured Program Generation TechniquesGrand Timely Topics in Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-60074-1_7(154-178)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60074-1_7
Song MTilevich E(2015)Reusing metadata across components, applications, and languagesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2014.09.00298:P4(617-644)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2014.09.002
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Reflective program generation with patterns
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Source code generation
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Patterns

Recommendations

CodeBricks: code fragments as building blocks
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN symposium on principles and practice of parallel programming (PPoPP 2003) and workshop on partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation (PEPM 2003)

We present a framework for code generation that allows programs to manipulate and generate code at the source level while the joining and splicing of executable code is carried out automatically at the intermediate code/VM level. The framework ...
Memories of bug fixes
SIGSOFT '06/FSE-14: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

The change history of a software project contains a rich collection of code changes that record previous development experience. Changes that fix bugs are especially interesting, since they record both the old buggy code and the new fixed code. This ...
Kava - a powerful and portable reflective Java (poster session)
OOPSLA '00: Addendum to the 2000 proceedings of the conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (Addendum)

Kava is a powerful and portable reflective Java that uses byte code rewriting to implement behavioural reflection. In our poster we briefly overview the Kava system, give an example of its use, and contrast it with simple byte code rewriting. More ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

GPCE '06: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering

October 2006

310 pages

ISBN:1595932372

DOI:10.1145/1173706

General Chair:
Stan Jarzabek
National University of Singapore, Singapore
,
Program Chairs:
Douglas Schmidt
Vanderbilt University, USA
,
Todd Veldhuizen
University of Waterloo, Canada

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

GPCE06

Sponsor:

GPCE06: Generative Programming and Component Engineering 2006

October 22 - 26, 2006

Oregon, Portland, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 56 of 180 submissions, 31%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

52
Total Citations
View Citations
360
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 06 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Caires LToninho B(2019)Refinement kinds: type-safe programming with practical type-level computationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605573:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360557
Smaragdakis YBiboudis AFourtounis G(2017)Structured Program Generation TechniquesGrand Timely Topics in Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-60074-1_7(154-178)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60074-1_7
Song MTilevich E(2015)Reusing metadata across components, applications, and languagesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2014.09.00298:P4(617-644)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2014.09.002
Miao WSiek JChin WHage J(2014)Compile-time reflection and metaprogramming for JavaProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2014 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation10.1145/2543728.2543739(27-37)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2543728.2543739
Chen SErwig MWalkingshaw E(2014)Extending Type Inference to Variational ProgramsACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/251819036:1(1-54)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2518190
Song MTilevich EGlinz MMurphy GPezzè M(2012)Metadata invariants: checking and inferring metadata coding conventionsProceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering10.5555/2337223.2337305(694-704)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2337223.2337305
Miao WSiek JOssowski SLecca P(2012)Pattern-based traitsProceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/2245276.2232057(1729-1736)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2245276.2232057
Song MTilevich E(2012)Metadata invariants: Checking and inferring metadata coding conventions2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227148(694-704)Online publication date: Jun-2012
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227148
Yi Q(2012)POET: a scripting language for applying parameterized source-to-source program transformationsSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.108942:6(675-706)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.1089
Huang SSmaragdakis Y(2011)MorphingACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/1890028.189002933:2(1-44)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1890028.1890029
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents