An architecture for reusable libraries

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have written and distributed a number of general purpose libraries covering a wide range of computing areas such as I/O, memory allocation, container data types, and sorting. Published studies showed that these libraries are more general, exible and eecient than comparable packages as application construction tools. Our libraries are based on an architecture in which two main interfaces are made explicit: disciplines to deene resource requirements, and methods to deene resource management. This paper discusses the discipline and method library architecture and a resource-oriented analysis approach for analyzing and designing libraries based on this architecture.