Lazy Composition of Representations in Java

Abstract. The separation of concerns has been a core idiom of software engineering for decades. In general, software can be decomposed properly only according to a single concern, other concerns crosscut the prevailing one. This problem is well known as “the tyranny of the dominant decomposition”. Similarly, at the programming level, the choice of a representation drives the implementation of the algorithms. This article explores an alternative approach with no dominant representation. Instead, each algorithm is developed in its “natural” representation and a representation is converted into another one only when it is required. To support this approach, we designed a laziness framework for Java, that performs partial conversions and dynamic optimizations while preserving the execution soundness. Performance evaluations over graph theory examples demonstrates this approach provides a practicable alternative to a naive one.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SOCO
• Authors: Rémi Douence, Xavier Lorca, Nicolas Loriant
• Keywords: Core Idiom, Dominant Decomposition, Dominant Representation, SOCO 2009, Software Engineering