research-article

Backstage Java: making a difference in metaprogramming

Authors:

Zachary Palmer,

Scott F. SmithAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

Pages 939 - 958

https://doi.org/10.1145/2048066.2048137

Published: 22 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We propose Backstage Java (BSJ), a Java language extension which allows algorithmic, contextually-aware generation and transformation of code. BSJ explicitly and concisely represents design patterns and other encodings by employing compile-time metaprogramming: a practice in which the programmer writes instructions which are executed over the program's AST during compilation. While compile-time metaprogramming has been successfully used in functional languages such as Template Haskell, a number of language properties (scope, syntactic structure, mutation, etc.) have thus far prevented this theory from translating to the imperative world. BSJ uses the novel approach of difference-based metaprogramming to provide an imperative programming style amenable to the Java community and to enforce that metaprograms are consistent and semantically unambiguous. To make the feasibility of BSJ metaprogramming evident, we have developed a compiler implementation and numerous working code examples.

References

[1]

J. Baker and W. C. Hsieh. Maya: Multiple-dispatch syntax extension in Java. In phPLDI, pages 270--281, 2002.

Digital Library

[2]

D. Batory, B. Lofaso, and Y. Smaragdakis. JTS: Tools for implementing domain-specific languages. Software Reuse, International Conference on, 0: 143, 1998.

Digital Library

[3]

M. Bravenboer, R. Vermaas, J. Vinju, and E. Visser. Generalized type-based disambiguation of meta programs with concrete object syntax. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE'05), volume 3676 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 157--172. Springer, 2005.

Digital Library

[4]

S. Chiba. A metaobject protocol for C+, 1995.

[5]

Codehaus Foundation. Groovy - building AST guide, May 2010. http://groovy.codehaus.org/BuildingASTGuide.

[6]

E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. M. Vlissides. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley Professional, 1 edition, November 1994.

Digital Library

[7]

S. E. Ganz, A. Sabry, and W. Taha. Macros as multi-stage computations: Type-safe, generative, binding macros in MacroML. In MacroML. In the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP '01, pages 74--85. ACM Press, 2001.

Digital Library

[8]

J. Gosling, B. Joy, G. Steele, and G. Bracha. The Java Language Specification, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley Longman, Amsterdam, 3 edition, June 2005.

Digital Library

[9]

S. S. Huang, D. Zook, and Y. Smaragdakis. Domain-specific languages and program generation with Meta-AspectJ. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol., 18: 6:1--6:32, November 2008.

Digital Library

[10]

S. Kamin, L. Clausen, and A. Jarvis. Jumbo: Run-time code generation for Java and its applications. In CGO '03: Proceedings of the international symposium on Code generation and optimization, pages 48--56, Washington, DC, USA, 2003. IEEE Computer Society.

Digital Library

[11]

E. Lippe and N. van Oosterom. Operation-based merging. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes, 17: 78--87, November 1992.

Digital Library

[12]

T. Mens. A state-of-the-art survey on software merging. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 28: 449--462, May 2002.

Digital Library

[13]

Z. Palmer and S. F. Smith. Backstage Java: Making a difference in metaprogramming. OOPSLA '11, 2011. ACM Digital Library supplemental material.

Digital Library

[14]

T. J. Parr and R. W. Quong. Adding semantic and syntactic predicates to LL(k): pred-LL(k). In Computational Complexity, pages 263--277. Springer-Verlag, 1994.

Digital Library

[15]

D. J. Quinlan. ROSE: Compiler support for object-oriented frameworks. Parallel Processing Letters, 10 (2/3): 215--226, 2000.

[16]

A. D. Robison. Impact of economics on compiler optimization. In Proceedings of the 2001 joint ACM-ISCOPE conference on Java Grande, JGI '01, pages 1--10, New York, NY, USA, 2001. ACM.

Digital Library

[17]

T. Sheard. Accomplishments and research challenges in meta-programming. In SAIG 2001: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantics, Applications, and Implementation of Program Generation, pages 2--44, London, UK, 2001. Springer-Verlag.

Digital Library

[18]

T. Sheard and S. P. Jones. Template meta-programming for Haskell. In ACM SIGPLAN Haskell Workshop 02, pages 1--16. ACM Press, 2002.

Digital Library

[19]

W. Taha and phet. al. MetaOCaml: A compiled, type-safe multi-stage programming language. http://www.metaocaml.org/.

[20]

W. Taha and T. Sheard. MetaML and multi-stage programming with explicit annotations. Theor. Comput. Sci., 248 (1--2): 211--242, 2000.

Digital Library

[21]

M. Tatsubori and S. Chiba. Programming support of design patterns with compile-time reflection, 1998.

[22]

L. Tratt. Compile-time meta-programming in a dynamically typed oo language. In Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Dynamic languages, DLS '05, pages 49--63, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM.

Digital Library

[23]

T. L. Veldhuizen. C+ templates are turing complete. Technical report, 2003.

[24]

T. L. Veldhuizen. Tradeoffs in metaprogramming. In PEPM '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation, pages 150--159, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.

Digital Library

[25]

E. Visser. Program transformation with Stratego/XT: Rules, strategies, tools, and systems in StrategoXT 0.9, 2004.

[26]

D. von Dincklage. Making patterns explicit with metaprogramming. In GPCE '03: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Generative programming and component engineering, pages 287--306, New York, NY, USA, 2003. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.

Digital Library

[27]

E. Westbrook, M. Ricken, J. Inoue, Y. Yao, T. Abdelatif, and W. Taha. Mint: Java multi-stage programming using weak separability. In ACM SIGPLAN 2010 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '10), June 2010.

Digital Library

Cited By

Lilis YSavidis A(2019)A Survey of Metaprogramming LanguagesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/335458452:6(1-39)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3354584
Omar CKurilova DNistor LChung BPotanin AAldrich J(2014)Safely Composable Type-Specific LanguagesProceedings of the 28th European Conference on ECOOP 2014 --- Object-Oriented Programming - Volume 858610.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_5(105-130)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_5
Omar CChung BKurilova DPotanin AAldrich JCombemale BCazzola WFrance R(2013)Type-directed, whitespace-delimited parsing for embedded DSLsProceedings of the First Workshop on the Globalization of Domain Specific Languages10.1145/2489812.2489815(8-11)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2489812.2489815
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Backstage Java: making a difference in metaprogramming
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

Recommendations

Backstage Java: making a difference in metaprogramming
OOPSLA '11

We propose Backstage Java (BSJ), a Java language extension which allows algorithmic, contextually-aware generation and transformation of code. BSJ explicitly and concisely represents design patterns and other encodings by employing compile-time ...
MorphScala: safe class morphing with macros
SCALA '14: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Scala Workshop

The goal of this paper is to design an easy type-safe metaprogramming API for Scala to capture generative metaprogramming tasks that depend on existing definitions to generate others, by writing meta-code as close as possible to regular Scala code.

...
Sound type-dependent syntactic language extension
POPL '16: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

Syntactic language extensions can introduce new facilities into a programming language while requiring little implementation effort and modest changes to the compiler. It is typical to desugar language extensions in a distinguished compiler phase after ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

October 2011

1104 pages

ISBN:9781450309400

DOI:10.1145/2048066

General Chair:
Cristina Videira Lopes
University of California, Irvine, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kathleen Fisher
Tufts University, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 10
OOPSLA '11
October 2011
1063 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2076021
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SPLASH '11

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

SPLASH '11: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 22 - 27, 2011

Oregon, Portland, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
370
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)5
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 25 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Lilis YSavidis A(2019)A Survey of Metaprogramming LanguagesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/335458452:6(1-39)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3354584
Omar CKurilova DNistor LChung BPotanin AAldrich J(2014)Safely Composable Type-Specific LanguagesProceedings of the 28th European Conference on ECOOP 2014 --- Object-Oriented Programming - Volume 858610.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_5(105-130)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_5
Omar CChung BKurilova DPotanin AAldrich JCombemale BCazzola WFrance R(2013)Type-directed, whitespace-delimited parsing for embedded DSLsProceedings of the First Workshop on the Globalization of Domain Specific Languages10.1145/2489812.2489815(8-11)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2489812.2489815
Palmer ZSmith S(2011)Backstage JavaACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2076021.204813746:10(939-958)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2076021.2048137

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents