Design and Implementation of an Aspect-Oriented C Programming Language

Abstract

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that implements crosscutting concerns in a modular way. People have witnessed the prosperity of AOP languages for Java and C++, such as AspectJ and AspectC++, which has propelled AOP to become an important programming paradigm with many interesting application scenarios, e.g., runtime verification. In contrast, the AOP languages for C are still poor and lack compiler support. In this paper, we design a new general-purpose and expressive aspect-oriented C programming language, namely Aclang, and implement a compiler for it, which brings fully-fledged AOP support into the C domain. We have evaluated the effectiveness and performance of our compiler against two state-of-the-art tools, ACC and AspectC++. In terms of effectiveness, Aclang outperforms ACC and AspectC++. In terms of performance, Aclang outperforms ACC in execution time and outperforms AspectC++ in both execution time and memory consumption.