SHF: Small: Modular Reflection

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As the internet and mobile devices become increasingly importantparts of our society, the need for web and mobile applications hasgrown. Recent advances in software frameworks have drasticallyreduced the amount of code needed to develop such applications. From aprogramming languages perspective, the key enabling technology isreflection, that is, the ability of a program to introspect and tomodify itself. Unfortunately, reflection comes at a heavy cost:it can delay the detection of bugs, it reduces the effectiveness ofbug-finding tools, and it reduces the speed of applications. Thegoal of this research project is to preserve the benefits ofreflection while eliminating the disadvantages, thereby improving thereliability and speed of web and mobile applications.The key observation that underlies this research is that uses ofreflection in software frameworks are governed by implicitconventions. If those conventions could be made explicit, thenautomated software tools will be able to effectively reason aboutreflective code. This research will create a rich specificationlanguage for making those conventions explicit, it will investigatealgorithms for inferring specifications from existing application code, and it will develop tools for checking theconformance of web-mobile applications and frameworks with respect to specifications.