A Meta-Aspect Protocol for Developing Dynamic Analyses

Dynamic aspect-oriented programming has been widely used for the development of dynamic analyses to abstract over low-level program instrumentation. Due to particular feature requirements in different analysis domains like debugging or testing, many different aspect languages were developed from scratch or by extensive compiler or interpreter extensions. We introduce another level of abstraction in form of a meta-aspect protocol to separate the host language from the analysis domain. A language expert can use this protocol to tailor an analysisspecific aspect language, based on which a domain expert can develop a particular analysis. Our design enables a flexible specification of the join point model, configurability of aspect deployment and scoping, and extensibility of pointcut and advice language. We present the application of our design to different dynamic analysis domains.