Reusing code from software libraries can reduce the time and effort to construct software
systems and also enable the development of larger systems. However, the benefits
that come from the use of software libraries may not be realized due to limitations in
the way that traditional software libraries are constructed. Libraries come equipped
with application programming interfaces (API) that help enforce the correct use of
the abstractions in those libraries. Writing new components and adapting existing
ones to conform to library APIs may require substantial amounts of "glue" code that
potentially affects software's efficiency, robustness, and ease-of-maintenance. If, as a
result, the idea of reusing functionality from a software library is rejected, no benefits
of reuse will be realized.
This dissertation explores and develops techniques that support the construction
of software libraries with abstraction layers that do not impede efficiency. In many
situations, glue code can be expected to have very low (or zero) performance overhead.
In particular, we describe advances in the design and development of active libraries
- software libraries that take an active role in the compilation of the user's code.
Common to the presented techniques is that they may "break" a library API (in a
controlled manner) to adapt the functionality of the library for a particular use case.
The concrete contributions of this dissertation are: a library API that supports
iterator selection in the Standard Template Library, allowing generic algorithms to
find the most suitable traversal through a container, allowing (in one case) a 30-fold improvement in performance; the development of techniques, idioms, and best practices
for concepts and concept maps in C++, allowing the construction of algorithms
for one domain entirely in terms of formalisms from a second domain; the construction
of generic algorithms for algorithmic differentiation, implemented as an active
library in Spad, language of the Open Axiom computer algebra system, allowing algorithmic
differentiation to be applied to the appropriate mathematical object and
not just concrete data-types; and the description of a static analysis framework to
describe the generic programming notion of local specialization within Spad, allowing
more sophisticated (value-based) control over algorithm selection and specialization
in categories and domains.
We will find that active libraries simultaneously increase the expressivity of the
underlying language and the performance of software using those libraries.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-05-7823 |
| Date | 2010 May 1900 |
| Creators | Smith, Jacob N. |
| Contributors | Järvi, Jaakko |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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