Performance effects of Aspect Oriented Programming

Aspect Oriented Programming is a new programming technique. This technique reduces the number of points where crosscutting, for instance logging, code has to be placed to a single point. This code, called advices, is later placed at the places where the programmer wants it, the join points. The placing of this code is done automatically and can therefore be dependant on the program, a weaver, which does it. This study is about the performance effects between programs created by such a weaver and a hand-coded version. The simplest advices give no real performance penalties, the more sophisticated, which access non-static join point data, are a little slower. The most sophisticated ones that modify the flow or are dependant on that flow are much slower.