Metaobject Protocols for Julia

Authors Marcelo Santos , António Menezes Leitão



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Author Details

Marcelo Santos
  • Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal
António Menezes Leitão
  • INESC-ID/Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal

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Marcelo Santos and António Menezes Leitão. Metaobject Protocols for Julia. In 11th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2022). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 104, pp. 13:1-13:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)
https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2022.13

Abstract

Metaobject Protocols enable programmers to extend programming languages without the need to understand the lower level details of their implementation. However, designing these protocols comes with two challenges: allow programmers to limit their concerns to higher level concepts and minimize performance penalties in programs. In this work, we propose metaobject protocol for the programming language Julia. Julia’s object system is very limited, when compared to languages following the Object-Oriented paradigm. However, Julia’s compilation approach allows for a considerable degree of code optimization through the exploration of runtime type information. Through the usage of Julia’s run-time optimizations, we propose a metaobject protocol that combines user-extensibility with limited performance penalties. This paper focuses on the development of a multiple inheritance method dispatch and method combination mechanisms with zero runtime overhead.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Language features
Keywords
  • Julia
  • Metaobject Protocols
  • Object-Oriented Programming
  • Performance

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