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International Symposium on Object Technologies for Advanced Software

ISOTAS 1996: Object Technologies for Advanced Software pp 118–136Cite as

Adaptive parameter passing

  • Parallelism and Distribution
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((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.

Supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (JNICT).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, 02115, Boston, MA, USA

    Cristina Videira Lopes

Authors
  1. Cristina Videira Lopes
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Editor information

Kokichi Futatsugi Satoshi Matsuoka

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lopes, C.V. (1996). Adaptive parameter passing. In: Futatsugi, K., Matsuoka, S. (eds) Object Technologies for Advanced Software. ISOTAS 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1049. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60954-7_47

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60954-7_47

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60954-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49747-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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