DECLARATIVE SPECIALIZATION OF OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMS

Designing and implementing generic software components is encouraged b y languages such as object-oriented ones and commonly advocated in mos t application areas. Generic software components have many advantages among which the most important is reusability. However, it comes at a price: genericity often incurs a loss of efficiency. This paper presen ts an approach aimed at reconciling genericity and efficiency. To do s o, we introduce declarations to the Java language to enable a programm er to specify how generic programs should be specialized for a particu lar usage pattern. Our approach has been implemented as a compiler fro m our extended language into standard Java.