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Design and partial evaluation of meta-objects for a concurrent reflective language

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ECOOP’98 — Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1445))

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Abstract

Customizable meta-objects are a powerful abstraction for extending language features and implementation mechanisms, but interpretive execution suffers from severe performance penalty. Some of this penalty can be reduced by applying partial evaluation to meta-interpreters, but partial evaluation of meta-objects in existing concurrent object-oriented languages is ineffective. This paper proposes a new meta-object design for our reflective language ABCL/R3. It yields meta-objects that can be optimized effectively using partial evaluation. The crux of the design is the separation of state-related operations from other operations, and this separation is accomplished by using reader/writer methods in our concurrent object-oriented language called Schematic. Our benchmark trials show that non-trivial programs with partially evaluated meta-objects run more than six times faster than ones that are interpreted by meta-objects. In addition, a partially evaluated program that uses a customized meta-object runs as efficiently as a program that is manually rewritten so as to have the same functionality without using meta-objects.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Graphics and Computer Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan

    Hidehiko Masuhara

  2. Department of Information Science, University of Tokyo, Japan

    Akinori Yonezawa

Authors
  1. Hidehiko Masuhara
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  2. Akinori Yonezawa
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Eric Jul

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Masuhara, H., Yonezawa, A. (1998). Design and partial evaluation of meta-objects for a concurrent reflective language. In: Jul, E. (eds) ECOOP’98 — Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1445. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054102

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054102

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64737-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69064-1

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