Virtual machine support for stateful aspects

Abstract

State Machines are very useful for modeling behavior of reactive systems. Stateful aspects have been proposed as a way to declaratively attach advice to transitions in a State Machine, so that the State Machine structure is seen in the implementation. Vanderperren et al. proposed an extension of the JAsCo Aspect-Oriented Programming Language for stateful aspects. This work proposes a low-overhead stateful aspects mechanism with the same semantics as JAsCo’s, built as an extension of Steamloom, a VM-supported AOP solution. The interface of our mechanism is similar to the aspect interface provided by Steamloom, with minimal augmentation. We provide detailed overhead analysis that highlights the advantages of our implementation.