Apostle: A Simple Incremental Weaver for a Dynamic Aspect Language

This paper describes the incremental weaving implementation of Apostle, an aspect-oriented language extension to Smalltalk modelled on AspectJ. Apostle implements incremental weaving in order to make aspect-oriented programming (AOP) a natural extension of the incremental edit-run-debug cycle of Smalltalk environments. The paper analyzes build dependencies for aspect declarations, and shows that two simple dependency table structures are sufficient to produce reasonable re-weaving efficiency. The resulting incremental weaver provides re-weaving performance proportional to the change in the program.