A reflective implementation of Java multi-methods
Rémi Forax, Étienne Duris, Gilles Roussel · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 2004
In Java, method implementations are chosen at runtime by late-binding with respect to the runtime class of just the receiver argument. However, in order to simplify many programming designs, late-binding with respect to the dynamic type of all arguments is sometimes desirable. This behavior, usually provided by multimethods, is known as multipolymorphism. This work presents a new multimethod implementation based on the standard Java reflection mechanism. Provided as a package, it does not require any language extension or any virtual machine modification. The design issues of this reflective implementation are presented together with a new and simple multimethod dispatch algorithm that efficiently supports class loading at runtime. This implementation provides a practicable and fully portable multimethod solution.