Flexible Calling Context Reification for Aspect-Oriented Programming

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) eases the development of profilers, debuggers, and reverse engineering tools. Such tools fre-quently rely on calling context information. However, current AOP technology, such as AspectJ, does not offer dedicated support for accessing complete calling context within aspects. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to calling context reification that reconciles flexibility, efficiency, accuracy, and portability. It relies on a generic bytecode instrumentation framework ensuring com-plete bytecode coverage, including the standard Java class library. We compose our program transformations for calling context reifi-cation with the AspectJ weaver, providing the aspect developer an efficient mechanism to manipulate a customizable representation of the complete calling context. To highlight the benefits of our ap-proach, we present ReCrash as an aspect using a stack-based call-ing context representation; ReCrash is an existing tool that gener-ates unit tests to reproduce program failures. In comparison with the original ReCrash tool, our aspect resolves several limitations, is extensible, covers also the standard Java class library, and causes less overhead