On Reconciling Objects, Components, and Efficiency in Programming Languages

The paradigm of component-oriented programming, which promises to improve upon object-oriented techniques in significant ways, is currently still difficult to apply in practice. One problem impeding further progress is that established strongly-checked, class-based, objectoriented languages do not take the requirements of component-oriented programming into account. The concepts of stand-alone messages and generic message forwarding, which have been developed in the programming language Lagoona, lead to language designs that suit the new paradigm better while still preserving an object-oriented programming style. We illustrate the utility of these concepts by analyzing several archetypal design and implementation problems and solving them in a coherent language framework. We also discuss how these concepts can be implemented efficiently and propose a suitable execution model based on high-level intermediate representations and dynamic recompilation.