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Towards Fully Reflective Environments

Chari, Guido and Garbervetsky, Diego and Marr, Stefan and Ducasse, Stéphane (2015) Towards Fully Reflective Environments. In: Onward! 2015 2015 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software. SPLASH Systems, Programming, and Applications . ACM, New York, USA, pp. 240-253. ISBN 978-1-4503-3688-8. (doi:10.1145/2814228.2814241) (KAR id:63823)

Abstract

Modern development environments promote live programming (LP) mechanisms because it enhances the development experience by providing instantaneous feed- back and interaction with live objects. LP is typically supported with advanced reflective techniques within dynamic languages. These languages run on top of Virtual Machines (VMs) that are built in a static manner so that most of their components are bound at compile time. As a consequence, VM developers are forced to work using the traditional edit-compile-run cycle, even when they are designing LP-supporting environments. In this paper we explore the idea of bringing LP techniques to the VM domain for improving their observability, evolution and adaptability at run-time. We define the notion of fully reflective execution environments (EEs), systems that provide reflection not only at the application level but also at the level of the VM. We characterize such systems, propose a design, and present Mate v1, a prototypical implementation. Based on our prototype, we analyze the feasibility and applicability of incorporating reflective capabilities into different parts of EEs. Furthermore, the evaluation demonstrates the opportunities such reflective capabilities provide for unanticipated dynamic adaptation scenarios, benefiting thus, a wider range of users.

Item Type: Book section
DOI/Identification number: 10.1145/2814228.2814241
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science)
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Stefan Marr
Date Deposited: 26 Dec 2017 17:41 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Feb 2021 13:49 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/63823 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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