Jumping to the Meta Level: Behavioral Reflection Can Be Fast and Flexible

  • Authors:
  • Michael Golm;Jürgen Kleinöder

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • Reflection '99 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Fully reflective systems have the notion of a control transfer from base-level code to meta-level code in order to change the behavior of the base-level system. There exist various opinions on how the programming model of a meta architecture has to look like. A common necessity of all models and systems is the need to intercept messages and operations, such as the creation of objects. We analyze the trade-offs of various message interception mechanisms for Java. We show their impact on the meta-level programming model and performance. We demonstrate that it is beneficial to integrate the interception mechanism with the virtual machine and the just-in-time compiler.