Paper Info
Title
End-user abstractions for meta-control: Reifying the reflectogram.
Abstract
Reflective facilities in OO languages are used both for implementing language extensions (such as AOP frameworks) and for supporting new programming tools and methodologies (such as object-centric debugging and message-based profiling). Yet controlling the runtime behavior of these reflective facilities introduces several challenges, such as computational overhead, the possibility of meta-recursion and an unclean separation of concerns between base and meta-level. In this paper we present five dimensions of meta-level control from related literature that try to remedy these problems. These dimensions are namely: temporal and spatial control, placement control, level control and identity control. We then discuss how these dimensions interact with language semantics in class-based OO languages in terms of: scoping, inheritance and first-class entities. We argue that the reification of the descriptive notion of reflectogram can unify the control of meta-level execution in all these five dimensions while expressing properly the underlying language semantics. We present an extended model for the reification of the reflectogram based on our additional analysis and validate our approach through a new prototype implementation that relies on byte-code instrumentation. Finally, we illustrate our approach through a case study on runtime tracing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1016/j.scico.2016.12.002
Science of Computer Programming
Keywords
Field
DocType
Reflection,Intercession,Reflectogram,Explicit control
Overhead (computing),Programming language,Abstraction,End user,Profiling (computer programming),Computer science,Separation of concerns,Theoretical computer science,Reification (Marxism),Tracing,Debugging
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
140
0167-6423
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nick Papoulias164.29
Marcus Denker228523.94
Stéphane Ducasse33418243.15
Luc Fabresse46215.67