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Costiou, Steven; Kerboeuf, Mickaël; Plantec, Alain; Denker, Marcus

doi:10.1145/3191697.3214335

Cited by 1 publication

(6 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Finally, the combination of sub-method and partial behavioral reflection is needed to define and apply controlled and fine grained behavioral variations. For instance, object-centric debuggers [11,12,13,14] need to capture very specific objects from the execution context, and to insert instrumentation at strategic places in their methods for debugging. Unanticipated reflection.…”

Section: Why Reflectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reflectivity's features can be applied in such an unanticipated way, which is a reason for one to choose Reflectivity as an implementation layer [19,44]. That capability is 5:15 fundamental to projects aiming to dynamically change and/or to control behavior of a running program [11,12,13,14,19,43,44], to enable/disable reflective features on-the-fly [56], or to provide on-demand, instant access to dynamic data [47,49,50,51].…”

Section: Why Reflectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is exploited by developers, e.g., to avoid code versioning noise [1] (because code has been modified with instrumentation), to separate debugging behavior and debugged programs' behavior [11,13], to intercept and profile meta-events from the Pharo IDE without modifying its source code [35], or to cope with constraints on code modifications [65]. To visualize and control instrumentation, which is invisible to users and to system tools, developers often built and used dedicated tools suiting their own usecase [1,11,12,14,64,65].…”

Section: Why Reflectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On-the-fly * debugging [11,12,13,14] On-demand object capture from user-selected (sub)expressions' execution, to which object-centric debugging operations are applied or removed on the fly (e.g., object-centric behavioral instrumentation or breakpoints).…”

Section: Ide Enhancementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It inspired an API, which has been integrated in Reflectivity. This API is already in use in some projects [12,14].…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

2020

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Context. Refining or altering existing behavior is the daily work of every developer, but that cannot be always anticipated, and software sometimes cannot be stopped. In such cases, unanticipated adaptation of running systems is of interest for many scenarios, ranging from functional upgrades to on-the-fly debugging or monitoring of critical applications.Inquiry. A way of altering software at run time is using behavioral reflection, which is particularly wellsuited for unanticipated adaptation of real-world systems. Partial behavioral reflection is not a new idea, and for years many efforts have been made to propose a practical way of expressing it. Many of these efforts resulted in practical solutions, but which introduced a semantic gap between the code that requires adaptation and the expression of the partial behavior.Approach. The idea of closing the gap between the code and the expression of the partial behavior led to the implementation of the Reflectivity framework. Using Reflectivity, developers annotate abstract syntax tree (AST) nodes with meta-behavior which is taken into account by the compiler to produce behavioral variations. Reflectivity is designed for dynamically typed systems which provide an AST representation of the program that is causally connected to the source code, and which support run-time recompilation. In this paper, we present Reflectivity, its API, its implementation in Pharo, its usage and limitations. We reflect on ten years of use of Reflectivity, and investigate in the literature how it has been used as a basic building block of many innovative ideas.Knowledge. Reflectivity has been used by 21 projects in the last decade, to implement reflective libraries or language extensions, code instrumentation, dynamic software update, debugging tools and software analysis tools. Our investigation shows that developers needed powerful and customized sets of heterogeneous reflection features for their projects, which Reflectivity provided. Despite its limitations, Reflectivity has proven to be a practical way of working with fine-grained reflective operations (at the AST level), and enabled a powerful way of dynamically add and modify behavior. By instrumenting through AST annotations, Reflectivity provides a flexible means to bridge the gap between the expression of the meta-behavior and the source code.Grounding. Reflectivity is actively used in research projects. During the past ten years, it served as a support for both implementation and fundamental base, for much research work including PhD theses, papers at conferences, workshops and in journals. Reflectivity is now an important library of the Pharo language, and is integrated in the standard distribution of the platform.Importance. Reflectivity exposes powerful abstractions to deal with behavioral adaptation, while providing a mature framework for unanticipated, non-intrusive, sub-method and partial behavioral reflection based on AST annotation. Finally, the AST annotation feature of Reflectivity opens new experimentation opportuni...

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Section: Why Reflectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%