Preserving Separation of Concerns Through Compilation

Current aspect-oriented (AO) compilation techniques fail to preserve the separation of concerns for postcompilation phases. At the minimum, it makes efficient incremental compilation and unit testing of AO programs challenging. The contribution of this work is an improved approach for aspect-oriented compilation. Our approach rests on a new interface between the AO high-level language (HLL) compiler implementation and the runtime environment. Our interface abstracts the realization of the crosscutting behavior at run-time from the HLL compiler implementations. The interface governs the intermediate code that the HLL compiler can generate and the semantics of the crosscutting primitives that it can expect. We present a preliminary evaluation using a simple but representative AO program showing the benefits of our approach. Disciplines Programming Languages and Compilers | Software Engineering This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cs_techreports/214 Preserving Separation of Concerns Through Compilation Technical Report: Dept. of Computer Sc., Iowa State University Hridesh Rajan Robert Dyer Youssef Hanna Harish Narayanappa Dept. of Computer Science Iowa State University Ames, IA 50010 {hridesh, rdyer, ywhanna, harish}@iastate.edu