SIGPLAN

The term aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has come to describe the set of programming mechanisms developed specifically to express crosscutting concerns. Since crosscutting concerns cannot be properly modularized within object-oriented programming, ...

Refactoring is the process of applying behavior-preserving transformations (called "refactorings") in order to improve a program's design. Associated with a refactoring is a set of preconditions that must be satisfied to guarantee that program behavior ...

Behavioral reflection is a powerful approach for adapting the behavior of running applications. In this paper we present and motivate partial behavioral reflection, an approach to more efficient and flexible behavioral reflection. We expose the spatial ...

Traits are a programming language technology that promote the reuse of methods between unrelated classes. This paper reports on a refactoring of the Smalltalk collections classes using traits. The original collection classes contained much duplication ...

Array programming shines in its ability to express computations at a high-level of abstraction, allowing one to manipulate and query whole sets of data at once. This paper presents the OPA model that enhances object-oriented programming with array ...

We present a system that accepts a specification of key data structure consistency constraints, then dynamically detects and repairs violations of these constraints, enabling the program to continue to execute productively even in the face of otherwise ...

This paper describes how to add first-class generic types---including mixins---to strongly-typed OO languages with nominal subtyping such as Java and C#. A generic type system is "first-class" if generic types can appear in any context where ...

Many modern programming languages support basic generic programming, sufficient to implement type-safe polymorphic containers. Some languages have moved beyond this basic support to a broader, more powerful interpretation of generic programming, and ...

Confinement properties impose a structure on object graphs which can be used to enforce encapsulation properties essential to certain program optimizations, modular reasoning, and software assurance. This paper formalizes the notion of confined type in ...

In order to perform meaningful experiments in optimizing compilation and run-time system design, researchers usually rely on a suite of benchmark programs of interest to the optimization technique under consideration. Programs are described as numeric, ...

Java workloads are becoming increasingly prominent on various platforms ranging from embedded systems, over general-purpose computers to high-end servers. Understanding the implications of all the aspects involved when running Java workloads, is thus ...

This paper describes the system overview of our Java Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler, which is the basis for the latest production version of IBM Java JIT compiler that supports a diversity of processor architectures including both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, ...

In an evolving software system, components must be able to change independently while remaining compatible with their peers. One obstacle to independent evolution is the brittle parameter problem: the ability of two components to communicate can depend ...

We present the rationale, design, and implementation of Relaxed MultiJava (RMJ), a backward-compatible extension of Java that allows programmers to add new methods to existing classes and to write multimethods. Previous languages supporting these forms ...

While Java provides many software engineering benefits, it lacks a coherent module system and instead provides only packages (which are primarily a name space mechanism) and classloaders (which are very low-level). As a result, large Java applications ...

The mostly concurrent garbage collection was presented in the seminal paper of Boehm et al. With the deployment of Java as a portable, secure and concurrent programming language, the mostly concurrent garbage collector turned out to be an excellent ...

With concurrent and garbage collected languages like Java and C# becoming popular, the need for a suitable non-intrusive, efficient, and concurrent multiprocessor garbage collector has become acute. We propose a novel mark and sweep on-the-fly algorithm ...

Java is becoming the main software platform for consumer and embedded devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, TV set-top boxes, and in-vehicle systems. Since many of these systems are memory constrained, it is extremely important to keep the memory ...

Distinguishing non-null references from possibly-null references at the type level can detect null-related errors in object-oriented programs at compile-time. This paper gives a proposal for retrofitting a language such as C# or Java with non-null ...

We present Object Equality Profiling (OEP), a new technique for helping programmers discover optimization opportunities in programs. OEP discovers opportunities for replacing a set of equivalent object instances with a single representative object. Such ...

Copying garbage collectors have a number of advantages over non-copying collectors, including cheap allocation and avoiding fragmentation. However, in order to provide completeness (the guarantee to reclaim each garbage object eventually), standard ...

General purpose garbage collectors have yet to combine short pause times with high throughput. For example, generational collectors can achieve high throughput. They have modest average pause times, but occasionally collect the whole heap and ...

We introduce a new family of connectivity-based garbage collectors (Cbgc) that are based on potential object-connectivity properties. The key feature of these collectors is that the placement of objects into partitions is determined by performing one of ...

The Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) framework requires developers to preserve architectural integrity constraints when writing EJB components. Breaking these constraints allows components to violate the transaction protocol, bypass security mechanisms, ...

Concurrent programming is notoriously difficult. Current abstractions are intricate and make it hard to design computer systems that are reliable and scalable. We argue that these problems can be addressed by moving to a declarative style of concurrency ...

Persistent object stores require a way to automatically upgrade persistent objects, to change their code and storage representation. Automatic upgrades are a challenge for such systems. Upgrades must be performed in a way that is efficient both in space ...