University of Freiburg, Germany
4pm Tuesday, 15th September, 2009
Room 4.31/33, Informatics Forum
JavaGI extends Java 1.5 conservatively by a generalized interface mechanism. The generalization accommodates retroactive and type-conditional interface implementations, binary methods, symmetric multimethods, interfaces over families of types, and static interface methods. These features make certain coding patterns redundant, increase the expressiveness of the type system, and allow solutions to extension and integration problems with components in binary form for which previously several unrelated extensions had been suggested.
The language is validated by a core calculus in the style of FGJ which comes with a type soundness proof, decidable subtyping and type checking, and deterministic evaluation. The talk also describes run-time support for dynamic loading of retroactive interface implementations as well as a modular compilation strategy for JavaGI. The JavaGI compiler is implemented as an extension of the Eclipse Compiler for Java. Benchmarks show that the code generated by the compiler offers good performance, whereas several case studies demonstrate the practical utility of the language and its implementation.