Design and partial evaluation of meta-objects for a concurrent reflective language

Abstract

Customizable meta-objects are a powerful abstraction for extending language features and implementation mechanisms, but interpretive execution suffers from severe performance penalty. Some of this penalty can be reduced by applying partial evaluation to meta-interpreters, but partial evaluation of meta-o6jecis in existing concurrent object-oriented languages is ineffective. This paper proposes a new meta-object design for our reflective language ABCL/R3. It yields meta-objects that can be optimized effectively using partial evaluation. The crux of the design is the separation of state-related operations from other operations, and this separation is accomplished by using reader/writer methods in our concurrent object-oriented language called Schematic. Our benchmark trials show that non-trivial programs with partially evaluated meta-objects run more than six times faster than ones that are interpreted by meta-objects. In addition, a partially evaluated program that uses a customized meta-object runs as efficiently as a program that is manually rewritten so as to have the same functionality without using meta-objects.