Adding Structural Reflection to the SSCLI

Although dynamic languages are becoming widely used due to the flexibility needs of specific software products, their major drawback is their runtime performance. Compiling the source program to an abstract machine’s intermediate language is the current technique used to obtain the best performance results. This intermediate code is then executed by a virtual machine developed as an interpreter. Although JIT adaptive optimizing compilation is currently used to speed up Java and .net intermediate code execution, this practice has not been employed successfully in the implementation of dynamically adaptive platforms yet. We present an approach to improve the runtime performance of a specific set of structural reflective primitives, extensively used in adaptive software development. Looking for a better performance, as well as interaction with other languages, we have employed the Microsoft Shared Source CLI platform, making use of its JIT compiler. The SSCLI computational model has been enhanced with semantics of the prototype-based object-oriented computational model. This model is much more suitable for reflective environments. The initial assessment of performance results reveals that augmenting the semantics of the SSCLI model, together with JIT generation of native code, produces better runtime performance than the existing implementations.

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