Efficient late binding of dynamic function compositions

Abstract

Adaptive software becomes more and more important as computing is increasingly context-dependent. Runtime adaptability can be achieved by dynamically selecting and applying context-specific code. Role-oriented programming has been proposed as a paradigm to enable runtime adaptive software by design. Roles change the objects’ behavior at runtime and thus allow adapting the software to a given context. However, this increased variability and expressiveness has a direct impact on performance and memory consumption. We found a high overhead in the steady-state performance of executing compositions of adaptations. This paper presents a new approach to use run-time information to construct a dispatch plan that can be executed efficiently by the JVM. The concept of late binding is extended to dynamic function compositions. We evaluated the implementation with a benchmark for role-oriented programming languages leveraging context-dependent role semantics achieving a mean speedup of 2.79× over the regular implementation.