This article presents the design principles and efficient implementation techniques for ABCL/R3, an object-oriented concurrent reflective language. One of the most distinguished features of ABCL/R3 is compilation techniques using partial evaluation, which effectively remove interpretation from meta-level programs. The meta-level objects are designed so that they can be partially evaluated in an effective manner. Benchmark programs show that our compilation frameworks make object execution drastically faster than interpreter-based implementations, and achieves performance close to nonreflective compilers.

The paper focuses on the allocation area, with the aim of providing a survey on systems that provides facilities to codify the behaviour of an application with regard to its allocation onto a target architecture. The paper analyses the design issues that arise in the definition of these facilities and presents the solutions adopted in several systems and programming environments. Open issues and future directions of research are outlined.