Using Partial Evaluation in Re ective Concurrent Object - Oriented Languages

Parallel and distributed programs often have hardware/problem speci c optimizations for improving quality of the program such as e ciency and robustness. Those optimizations, unfortunately, degrade portability and re-usability as they are intertwined with the original algorithm description. Re ective languages, which provide the application programmer extensible and abstract implementation of the language, can describe such optimizations as extensions to the language. The separation of optimization descriptions gains portability and re-usability of both application programs and optimizations. However, the interpretive execution model of re ective languages imposes a large amount of performance overhead, which sometimes outweighs benets of optimizations. Previous re ective languages prohibit some of operations being modi ed via re ection, so as to reduce the amount of interpretation overhead. The imperfection of this approach is that it still leaves a considerable amount of overhead, and it yields less exible, unclear re ective architecture. This dissertation investigates design and compilation framework of metainterpreters and meta-objects in an object-oriented concurrent language ABCL/R3. By using partial evaluation to compile re ective programs, ABCL/R3 achieves exible and lucid re ective architecture and e cient execution at the same time. We design fulledged meta-interpreters by examining several concurrent programming examples. A newly proposed delegation mechanism enables to de ne modular and scope controlled extensions to meta-interpreters. We design meta-objects by exploiting the notion of reader/writer methods in a concurrent object-oriented language Schematic, so that they can be e ectively partially evaluated. The compilation frameworks of meta-interpreters and meta-objects basically translate concurrent object de nitions into a sequential program, then apply partial evaluator for a sequential language, and generates a program in a (non-re ective) concurrent object-oriented language, in which base-level and meta-level objects are collapsed to single level objects. The e ciency of generated programs is demonstrated by several benchmark programs, in which our compiler exhibits performance close to non-re ective languages.