Implementation Techniques for Faster Reflective Computing

Abstract

Reflection had been regarded as an idea that was inapplicable for practical software development. This paper presents techniques that we have developed for better implementation of reflective computing. Our techniques move the bottleneck of reflective computing from runtime to load/compile time so that reflection could be pragmatic in C++/Java programming, in which execution performance is significant. This paper also mentions our perspective on this research area, in particular, with respect to the relation between reflection and aspect-oriented programming.