Woven Code Research Articles

MAJOR: AN ASPECT WEAVER WITH FULL COVERAGE SUPPORT

Prevailing Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) frameworks for Java, such as AspectJ, use bytecode instrumentation techniques to weave aspects into application code. Unfortunately, those frameworks do not support weaving in the Java class library. When implementing aspect-based tools, such as profilers, debugger, or dynamic program analysis tools in general, the aforementioned restriction becomes an important limitation for successfully applying AOP.In this article we present MAJOR, an aspect weaver with full coverage support. That is, MAJOR ensures that aspects are woven into all classes loaded in a Java Virtual Machine, including those in the standard Java class library. We describe the intricacies of instrumentation of the Java class library and present an extended instrumentation approach allowing the user to choose between a pure Java weaving solution based on a two-phases instrumentation scheme, or a single-phase one requiring a tiny native code layer. The single-phase approach allows to better isolate the weaving process from the execution of the woven code.

Side-effect localization for lazy, purely functional languages via aspects

Many side-effecting programming activities, such as profiling and tracing, can be formulated as crosscutting concerns and be framed as side-effecting aspects in the aspect-oriented programming paradigm. The benefit gained from this separation of concerns is particularly evident in purely functional programming, as adding such aspects using techniques such as monadification will generally lead to crosscutting changes. This paper presents an approach to provide side-effecting aspects for lazy purely functional languages in a user transparent fashion. We propose a simple yet direct state manipulation construct for developing side-effecting aspects and devise a systematic monadification scheme to translate the woven code to monadic style purely functional code. Furthermore, we present a static and dynamic semantics of the aspect programs and reason about the correctness of our monadification scheme with respect to them.

Optimising aspectJ

AspectJ, an aspect-oriented extension of Java, is becoming increasingly popular. However, not much work has been directed at optimising compilers for AspectJ. Optimising AOP languages provides many new and interesting challenges for compiler writers, and this paper identifies and addresses three such challenges.First, compiling around advice efficiently is particularly challenging. We provide a new code generation strategy for around advice, which (unlike previous implementations) both avoids the use of excessive inlining and the use of closures. We show it leads to more compact code, and can also improve run-time performance. Second, woven code sometimes includes run-time tests to determine whether advice should execute. One important case is the cflow pointcut which uses information about the dynamic calling context. Previous techniques for cflow were very costly in terms of both time and space. We present new techniques to minimise or eliminate the overhead of cflow using both intra- and inter-procedural analyses. Third, we have addressed the general problem of how to structure an optimising compiler so that traditional analyses can be easily adapted to the AOP setting.We have implemented all of the techniques in this paper in abc , our AspectBench Compiler for AspectJ, and we demonstrate significant speedups with empirical results. Some of our techniques have already been integrated into the production AspectJ compiler, ajc 1.2.1.

Construction, analysis and performance of generalised woven codes

AbstractGeneralised woven codes (WC) are constructed by combining the woven code structure with the idea of generalised concatenated codes, also known as multi‐level codes. The required nested inner convolutional code is analysed. The encoder structure of this new class of codes is described and fundamental code parameters are derived. It is shown that generalised WC have a free distance which is superior to that of comparable WC. Several iterative and non‐iterative decoding strategies are discussed. It is shown that the decoding complexity of the nested inner code is not larger than the decoding complexity of its mother code. Finally, bit error rates obtained from simulations are discussed and compared with other code structures like WC. Copyright © 2004 AEI