This paper proposes an approach called SCoPE, which supports user-defined analysis-based pointcuts in aspect-oriented programming (AOP) languages. The advantage of our approach is better integration with existing AOP languages than previous approaches. Instead of extending the language, SCoPE allows the programmer to write a pointcut that analyzes a program by using a conditional (if) pointcut with introspective reflection libraries. A compilation scheme automatically eliminates runtime tests for such a pointcut. The approach also makes effects of aspects visible to the analysis, which is essential for determining proper aspect interactions. We implemented a SCoPE compiler for the AspectJ language on top of the AspectBench compiler using a backpatching technique. The implementation efficiently finds analysis-based pointcuts, and generates woven code without runtime tests for those pointcuts. Our benchmark tests with JHotDraw and other programs showed that SCoPE compiles programs with less than 1 % compile-time overhead, and generates a program that is as efficient as an equivalent program that uses merely static pointcuts.

Web sites and web browsers have recently evolved into platforms on top of which entire applications are delivered dynamically, mostly as JavaScript source code. This delivery format has sparked extremely enthusiastic efforts to customize both individual web sites and entire browsers in ways the original authors never expected or accommodated. Such customizations take the form of yet more script dynamically injected into the application, and the current idioms to do so exploit arcane JavaScript features and are extremely brittle. In this work, we accept the popularity of extensions and seek better linguistic mechanisms to support them. We suggest adding to JavaScript aspect-oriented features that allow straightforward and declarative ways for customization code to modify the targeted application. Compared to most prior aspect-related research, our work has a different motivation and a different target programming environment, both of which lead to novel design and implementation techniques. Our aspect weaving is entirely integrated into a new dynamic JIT compiler, which lets us properly handle advice to first-class functions in the presence of arbitrary aliasing, without resorting to whole-program code transformations. Our prototype demonstrates that an aspect-oriented approach to web-application customization is often more efficient than current idioms while simplifying the entire process.

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) aims at modularising crosscutting concerns that show up in software. The success of AOP has been almost viral and nearly all areas in Software Engineering and Programming Languages have become “infected ” by the AOP bug in one way or another. Interestingly the functional programming community (and, in particular, the pure functional programming community) seems to be resistant to the pandemic. The goal of this paper is to debate the possible causes of the functional programming community’s resistance and to raise awareness and interest by showcasing the benefits that could be gained from having a functional AOP language. At the same time, we identify the main challenges and explore the possible design-space. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.2 [Programming Languages]: Language Classifications—Applicative (functional) languages,

Pointcuts in the current AspectJ family of languages are loosely checked because the languages allow compositions of pointcuts that never match any join points, which developers are unlikely to intend, for example, set( * *)&&get(* *). We formalize the problem by defining well-formedness of pointcuts and design a novel type system for assuring well-formedness. The type of pointcuts is encoded by using record, union and the bottom types.