Tion Handling in Multiprocessor Operating Systems Using Object-oriented Design Techniques. in Pro- Ceedings of Object-oriented Programming Systems

This paper presents re ective object management as s set of facilities for handling objects with various properties such as grain-size and lifespan e ciently and naturally. The facilities are classes, variablelength identi ers, memory management, and e cient communication between objects. A class hides details of the implementation of an object such as language and hardware dependency. An identi er is a variable whose length depends on its naming context. There are two or more naming contexts in the system which compose a hierarchical structure. Each naming context guarantees the uniqueness of identi ers it contains. Address spaces are divided into equal sized fragments or slots, and several objects may reside in one address space. This reduces the context switching overhead caused by communication. By tracing communication paths, execution of extra paths can be avoided by replacing them with local procedure calls. These facilities are based on the Muse object architecture and implemented on the Muse operating system. Re ective object management can de ne objects in such a way that there is no distinction between objects supported by operating systems and objects supported by programming languages in a multi-lingual environment. We also show our preliminary evaluation of the implementation.