The concepts of abstract and virtual machines have been used for many different purposes to obtain diverse benefits such as code portability, compiler simplification, interoperability, distribution and direct support of specific paradigms. Despite of these benefits, the main drawback of virtual machines has always been execution performance. Consequently, there has been considerable research aimed at improving the performance of virtual machine's application execution compared to its native counterparts. Techniques like adaptive Just In Time compilation or efficient and complex garbage collection algorithms have reached such a point that Microsoft and Sun Microsystems identify this kind of platforms as appropriate to implement commercial applications.#R##N##R##N#What we have noticed in our research work is that these platforms have heterogeneity, extensibility, platform porting and adaptability limitations caused by their monolithic designs. Most designs of common abstract machines are focused on supporting a fixed programming language and the computation model they offer is set to the one employed by the specific language. We have identified reflection as a basis for designing an abstract machine, capable of overcoming the previously mentioned limitations. Reflection is a mechanism that gives our platform the capability to adapt the abstract machine to different computation models and heterogeneous computing environments, not needing to modify its implementation. In this paper we present the reflective design of our abstract machine, example code extending the platform, a reference implementation, and a comparison between our implementation and other well-known platforms.
['Francisco Ortin', 'Diego Diez']
Designing an adaptable heterogeneous abstract machine by means of reflection