cHALO, stateful aspects in C
Bram Adams, Charlotte Herzeel, Kris Gybels · 2008
History-based pointcut languages are a very expressive and powerful means to obtain robust pointcuts. To implement them in an efficient way, people have proposed various optimisations and program history retention strategies, especially for Java-based aspect languages. In this paper, we focus on history-based pointcut languages for C, which has no provisions for weak references or automatic garbage collection. Because C programmers want explicit control over pointcut behaviour and memory footprint, we claim that a limited set of fine-grained temporal pointcut primitives with well-known memory behaviour strikes a good balance between flexibility and memory consumption. A working prototype (cHALO) has been designed and implemented, based on the HALO pointcut language for Lisp.