2,246 papers · page 78 of 113
The Java TM programming language contains built-in synchronization primitives for use in constructing multithreaded programs. Efficient implementation of these synchronization primitives is necessary in order to achieve high performance. Recent research [9, 12, 10, 3, 7] has focu…
It is common practice for software developers to use examples to guide development efforts. This largely unwritten, yet standard, practice of "develop by example" is often supported by examples bundled with library or framework packages, provided in textbooks, and made available …
Wysiwyg editors simplified document creation by separating the document contents from the looks and by automating the re-application of the looks to changing contents. In the same way Intentional Software simplifies software creation by separating the software contents in terms o…
Aspect-oriented programming is considered a promising new technology. As object-oriented programming did before, it is beginning to pervade all areas of software engineering. With its growing popularity, practitioners and academics alike are wondering whether they should start lo…
Embedded microcontrollers are becoming increasingly prolific, serving as the primary or auxiliary processor in products and research systems from microwaves to sensor networks. Microcontrollers represent perhaps the most severely resource-constrained embedded processors, often wi…
In this essay, I consider some of the factors that are making it more and more difficult to expend the effort necessary to do system design. Because of changes in the economics of the field in both industry and research, we have become less able to take the time needed to do real…
This paper introduces the expander, a new object-oriented (OO) programming language construct designed to support object adaptation. Expanders allow existing classes to be noninvasively updated with new methods, fields, and superinterfaces. Each client can customize its view of a…
We present an operational semantics and type safety proof for multiple inheritance in C++. The semantics models the behaviour of method calls, field accesses, and two forms of casts in C++ class hierarchies exactly, and the type safety proof was formalized and machine-checked in …
This paper presents a Java-like core language with primitives for object-oriented distribution and explicit code mobility. We apply our formulation to prove the correctness of several optimisations for distributed programs. Our language captures crucial but often hidden aspects o…
An aspect observes the execution of a base program; when certain actions occur, the aspect runs some extra code of its own. In the AspectJ language, the observations that an aspect can make are confined to the current action: it is not possible to directly observe the history of …
Virtual machines for languages such as the Java programming language make extensive use of online profiling and dynamic optimization to improve program performance. But despite the important role that profiling plays in achieving high performance, current virtual machines discard…
As object-oriented class libraries evolve, classes are occasionally deprecated in favor of others with roughly the same functionality. In Java's standard libraries, for example, class Hashtable has been superseded by HashMap, and Iterator is now preferred over Enumeration. Migrat…
Unanticipated changes to complex software systems can introduce anomalies such as duplicated code, suboptimal inheritance relationships and a proliferation of run-time downcasts. Refactoring to eliminate these anomalies may not be an option, at least in certain stages of software…
It is now well established that the device scaling predicted by Moore's Law is no longer a viable option for increasing the clock frequency of future uniprocessor systems at the rate that had been sustained during the last two decades. As a result, future systems are rapidly movi…
The standard dispatching mechanisms built into programming languages are sometimes inadequate to the needs of the programmer. In the case of Java, the need for more flexibility has led to the development of a number of tools, including visitors and multi-method extensions, that e…
Ever since their invention 30 years ago, checked exceptions have been a point of much discussion. On the one hand, they increase the robustness of software by preventing the manifestation of unanticipated checked exceptions at run-time. On the other hand, they decrease the adapta…
Representing programs as text strings makes programming harder then it has to be. The source text of a program is far removed from its behavior. Bridging this conceptual gulf is what makes programming so inhumanly difficult -- we are not compilers. Subtext is a new medium in whic…
Micro patterns are similar to design patterns, except that micro patterns are stand at a lower, closer to the implementation, level of abstraction. Micro patterns are also unique in that they are mechanically recognizable, since each such pattern can be expressed as a formal cond…
Instrumenting programs with code to monitor runtime behavior is a common technique for profiling and debugging. In practice, instrumentation is either inserted manually by programmers, or automatically by specialized tools that monitor particular properties. We propose Program Tr…
As a value flows across the boundary between interoperating languages, it must be checked and converted to fit the types and representations of the target language. For simple forms of data, the checks and coercions can be immediate; for higher order data, such as functions and o…