Generating incremental implementations of object-set queries
GPCE '08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering
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High-level query constructs help greatly improve the clarity of programs and the productivity of programmers, and are being introduced to increasingly more languages. However, the use of high-level queries can come at a cost to program efficiency, because these queries are expensive to compute and may be computed repeatedly on slightly changed inputs. For efficient computation in practical applications, an automatic method is needed to incrementally maintain query results with respect to updates that may change those results. This dissertation describes a general and powerful method for automatically generating incremental implementations of high-level queries in object-oriented programs. These queries may be over objects, sets, tuples, and maps; and may contain aggregation and grouping constructs. The method generates coordinated maintenance code and invocation mechanisms for all updates that may affect the query results, ensuring that the results are computed correctly and efficiently even though object references may be aliased arbitrarily. We present implementations and experimental results showing the effectiveness of our method when applied to a variety of problem domains.