A flexible architecture for pointcut-advice language implementations

Abstract

Current implementations for aspect-oriented programming languages map the aspect-oriented concepts of source programs to object-oriented bytecode. This hinders execution environments with dedicated support for such concepts in applying their optimizations, as they have to recover the original aspect definition from bytecode. To address this representational gap we propose an architecture for implementations of pointcut-advice languages where aspect-oriented concepts are preserved as first-class entities. In this architecture, compilers generate a model of the crosscutting which is executed by virtual machines.