Adaptive parameter passing

  • Cristina Videira Lopes
Parallelism and Distribution
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 1049)

Abstract

Control over parameter passing is a key issue in distributed object-oriented applications. The two simplest solutions — passing objects by global reference and passing objects by deep copy — both have significant drawbacks. Instead, an intermediate amount of copying is often best. However, achieving the right amount of copying is difficult for two reasons: (i) compilers and operating systems cannot automatically make the best decision on how much to copy; (ii) there hasn't been a good mechanism for the programmer to express the intermediate amount of copying that should be done.

This paper presents a new mechanism that allows programmers to express in a natural and succinct way how much of the object graph should be copied to the remote context. The specifications are done using a very simple declarative meta-language — GOOP — that has graphs of classes as its domain. GOOP allows the specification of: (i) whether the parameter object should be passed by copy or by reference; and (ii) if passed by copy, what parts of the parameter object's graph should be copied.

Keywords

Address Space Remote Service Class Graph Object Graph Graph Language 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1996

Authors and Affiliations

  • Cristina Videira Lopes
    • 1
  1. 1.College of Computer ScienceNortheastern UniversityBostonUSA

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