Design and Partial Evaluation of Metaobjects for a Concurrent Reflective Language.pdfVIP

|revised version will app ea r in ECOOP98 pro ceedings| Design and Partial Evaluation of Meta-ob jects for a Concurrent Re ective Language  y Hidehiko MASUHARA Akinori YONEZAWA masuhara@graco.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp yonezawa@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp Abstract In concurrent ob ject-oriented languages, customizable meta-ob jects are p owerful abstraction for extending and optimizing crucial implementation mechanisms such as metho d dispatch and mutual exclusion. However, interpretive execution of meta-ob jects causes severe p erformance p enalty. Our previous study shows that applying partial eval- uation to meta- interpr eters is useful for alleviating the problem, but partial evaluation of existing meta- objects virtually fails, b ecause they are concurrent ob jects and designed as state-transition machines. This pap er prop oses a new meta-ob ject design for our re- ective language ABCL/R3, which can b e eectively optimized using partial evaulation. The crux of the meta-ob ject design is separation of state-related op erations, which is realized by using the reader/writer metho ds in our concurrent ob ject-oriented language Schematic. Our b enchmarks showed that a non-trivial program with partially evaluated meta-ob jects runs (1) 6.8 times faster than the one with merely compiled meta-ob jects, and (2) only 2.2 times slower than the directly compiled program without meta-ob jects, which is supp osed to have the b est p erformance. In addition, a program that uses a customized meta-ob ject for guarded metho d invo cation runs as ecient