A Reflective Architecture for an Adaptable Object-Oriented Operating System Based on C++
ECOOP '97 Proceedings of the Workshops on Object-Oriented Technology
Dynamic C++ classes: a lightweight mechanism to update code in a running program
ATEC '98 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
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Object-oriented design and object-oriented languages support the development of independent software components such as class libraries. When using such components, versioning becomes a key issue. While various ad-hoc techniques and coding idioms have been used to provide versioning, all of these techniques have deficiencies--ambiguity, the necessity of recompilation or re-coding, or the loss of binary compatibility of programs. Components from different software vendors are versioned at different times. Maintaining compatibility between versions must be consciously engineered. New technologies--such as distributed objects--further complicate libraries by requiring multiple implementations of a type simultaneously in a program. This paper describes a new C++ object model called the Shared Object Model (SOM) for C++ users, and a new implementation model called the Object Binary Interface (OBI) for C++ implementors. These techniques provide a mechanism for allowing multiple implementations of an object in a program. Early analysis of this approach has shown it to have performance broadly comparable to conventional implementations.