A Reflective Implementation of Java Multi-Methods

  • Authors:

  • Remi Forax;Etienne Duris;Gilles Roussel

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In Java, method implementations are chosen at runtime by late-binding with respect to the runtime class of just the receiver argument. However, in order to simplify many programming designs, late-binding with respect to the dynamic type of all arguments is sometimes desirable. This behavior, usually provided by multi-methods, is known as multipolymorphism. This paper presents a new multi-method implementation based on the standard Java reflection mechanism. Provided as a package, it does not require any language extension nor any virtual machine modification. The design issues of this reflective implementation are presented together with a new and simple multi-method dispatch algorithm that efficiently supports class loading at runtime. This implementation provides a practicable and fully portable multi-method solution.