Abstract

Designing and implementing generic software components is encouraged by languages such as object-oriented ones and commonly advocated in most application areas. Generic software components have many advantages among which the most important is reusability. However, it comes at a price: genericity often incurs a loss of efficiency. This paper presents an approach aimed at reconciling genericity and efficiency. To do so, we introduce declarations to the Java language to enable a programmer to specify how generic programs should be specialized for a particular usage pattern. Our approach has been implemented as a compiler from our extended language into standard Java. 1 Introduction The object-oriented paradigm has well-recognized advantages for application design, and more specifically for program structure. It makes it possible to decompose an application in terms of well-defined, generic components, closely corresponding to the structure of the modeled problem. This structuring leads...

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