Generic Advice: On the Combination of AOP with Generative Programming in AspectC++

Besides object-orientation, generic types or templates and aspect- oriented programming (AOP) gain increasing popularity as they provide addi- tional dimensions of decomposition. Most modern programming languages like Ada, Eiffel, and C++ already have built-in support for templates. For Java and C# similar extensions will be available in the near future. Even though promis- ing, the combination of aspects with generic and generative programming is still a widely unexplored field. This paper presents our extensions to the As- pectC++ language, an aspect-oriented C++ derivate. By these extensions aspects can now affect generic code and exploit the potentials of generic code and tem- plate metaprogramming in their implementations. This allows aspects to inject template metaprograms transparently into the component code. A case study demonstrates that this feature enables the development of highly expressive and efficient generic aspect implementations in AspectC++. A discussion whether these concepts are applicable in the context of other aspect-oriented language extensions like AspectJ rounds up our contribution.

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