The abc Group Building the abc AspectJ compiler with Polyglot and Soot abc Technical Report No . abc - 2004 - 4

Aspect-oriented programming and the development of aspect-oriented languages are rapidly gaining momentum, and the advent of this new kind of programming language provides interesting challenges for compiler developers, both in the frontend semantic analysis and in the backend code generation. This paper is about the design and implementation of the abc compiler for the aspect-oriented language AspectJ. In this paper we show how we can leverage existing compiler technology by combining Polyglot (an extensible compiler framework for Java) in the frontend and Soot (a framework for analysis and transformation of Java) in the backend. We provide a software architecture which cleanly separates these existing tools from the aspect-specific parts of the compiler. A second important contribution of the paper is that we describe our implementation strategies for new challenges that are specific to aspect-oriented language constructs. Although our compiler is targeted towards AspectJ, many of these ideas apply to aspect-oriented languages in general. Finally, we found that in developing abc we clarified many language issues which in turn simplified the implementation. Our abc compiler implements the full AspectJ language as defined by ajc 1.2 and is freely available under the GNU LGPL.