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Lean and Efficient System Software Product Lines: Where Aspects Beat Objects

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Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development II

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TAOSD,volume 4242))

Abstract

Software development in the domain of embedded and deeply embedded systems is dominated by cost pressure and extremely limited hardware resources. As a result, modern concepts for separation of concerns and software reuse are widely ignored, as developers worry about the thereby induced memory and performance overhead. Especially object-oriented programming (OOP) is still little in demand. For the development of highly configurable fine-grained system software product lines, however, separation of concerns (SoC) is a crucial property. As the overhead of object-orientation is not acceptable in this domain, we propose aspect-oriented programming (AOP) as an alternative. Compared to OOP, AOP makes it possible to reach similar or even better separation of concerns with significantly smaller memory footprints. In a case study for an embedded system product line the memory costs for SoC could be reduced from 148–236% to 2–10% by using AOP instead of OOP.

This work was partly supported by the German Research Council (DFG) under grant no. SCHR 603/4 and SP 968/2-1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science 4 – Distributed Systems and Operating Systems, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

    Daniel Lohmann, Olaf Spinczyk & Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat

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  1. Daniel Lohmann
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  2. Olaf Spinczyk
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  3. Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Department, Lancaster University, InfoLab 21, South Drive, LA1 4WA, Lancaster, UK

    Awais Rashid

  2. University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500, Enschede, AE, The Netherlands

    Mehmet Aksit

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Lohmann, D., Spinczyk, O., Schröder-Preikschat, W. (2006). Lean and Efficient System Software Product Lines: Where Aspects Beat Objects. In: Rashid, A., Aksit, M. (eds) Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4242. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11922827_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11922827_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

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