Authors:
Jose Manuel Redondo
1
;
Francisco Ortin
1
and
J. Baltasar Garcia Perez-Schofield
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Oviedo, Spain
;
2
University of Vigo, Spain
Keyword(s):
Dynamic inheritance, structural reflection, dynamic languages, JIT compilation, SSCLI, virtual machine,
prototype-based object-oriented model.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Languages and Compilers
;
Object-Oriented Programming
;
Programming Languages
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
Virtual machines have been successfully applied in diverse scenarios to obtain several benefits. Application interoperability and distribution, code portability, and improving the runtime performance of programs are examples of these benefits. Techniques like JIT compilation have improved virtual machine runtime performance, becoming an adequate alternative to develop different types of software products. We have extended a production JIT-based virtual machine so they offer low-level support for structural reflection, in order to obtain the aforementioned advantages in dynamic languages implementation. As various dynamic languages offer support for dynamic inheritance, the next step in our research work is to enable this support in the aforementioned JIT-based virtual machine. Our approach enables dynamic inheritance in a language-neutral way, supporting both static and dynamic languages, so no language specification have to be modified to enable these features. It also enables stati
c and dynamic languages to interoperate, since both types are now low-level supported by our machine.
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