Generic Advice: On the Combination of AOP with Generative Programming in AspectC++

Besides object-orientation, generic types or templates and aspectoriented programming (AOP) gain increasing popularity as they provide additional dimensions of decomposition. Most modern programming languages like Ada, Eiffel, and C++ already have built-in support for templates. For Java and C# similar extensions will be available in the near future. Even though promising, the combination of aspects with generic and generative programming is still a widely unexplored field. This paper presents our extensions to the AspectC++ language, an aspect-oriented C++ derivate. By these extensions aspects can now affect generic code and exploit the potentials of generic code and template metaprogramming in their implementations. This allows aspects to inject template metaprograms transparently into the component code. A case study demonstrates that this feature enables the development of highly expressive and efficient generic aspect implementations in AspectC++. A discussion whether these concepts are applicable in the context of other aspect-oriented language extensions like AspectJ rounds up our contribution.