Re: [aspectj-users] Weaving source text? Well not really...

[Andy Clement <andrew.clement@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

> Thanks for the reply Andy, and it's great to know that you have already been
> thinking about these things.  Were you thinking along the lines of a general
> purpose template-style meta-programming facility?  I.e. aspects that target
> the source -- grabbing AST context in a pointcut, etc.  Or just implementing
> specific features literally?  Getter/Setter seems like it would be easiest
> to implement in a template-style solution, but the ? operator and certainly
> val would be more difficult.  Although I don't know.  I think both the ? and
> val are pretty easy "sugars" so perhaps they too could be satisfied in a
> general template based approach.

I think realistically if the features were to be implemented anywhere
in the near term they would be implemented directly.  Time/resource
constraints limit the ability to build a general compiler plugin
mechanism for aspectj, the best we might be able to manage is sorting
out APT support and then lombok could be used directly.  I believe the
code has to be compilable with javac in the first place, so something
like "?." could not be  done this way, it would need a direct
implementation (with modified grammar).

> I don't think that these kinds of ideas are outside of the spirit of
> AspectJ.  In our group, we have migrated to almost exclusively using
> annotations in pointcuts -- so our junior/average developers don't have to
> even look at any AspectJ syntax, but we get the power.  Such a
> meta-programming facility would fit into this power/complexity trade-off
> nicely as the implementation of the ValAspect would be one or two senior
> folks maintaining it, and still be usable by dozens of junior developers.

I'm not sure you'd call it an aspect if it was adding support for
'val', but I know what you mean about one key group maintaining this
kind of transform and another larger group simply consuming it.

cheers
Andy

> On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Andy Clement <andrew.clement@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Steve,
>>
>> Someone else mentioned Lombok interop a little while ago.  In
>> *principal* it should be possible if AspectJ sorted out its support
>> for annotation processing tools, I think, but so far I haven't had
>> time to look at it.  I got APT support working a while back for
>> AspectJ but it was just in a prototype workspace that I've since
>> misplaced.
>>
>> You are right that AspectJ could go down this road to some degree.
>> I've thought about a few things, like
>> auto-generating getters/setters (so not even requiring you to write
>> ITDs, just being told in some way that this property needs a
>> getter/setter and just creating them), supporting the null-safe
>> dereference operator '?.' - and your val is kind of another case.
>> Certainly goes beyond the initial remit of AspectJ as an aspect
>> oriented programming language - but these are the kinds of things I
>> think languages need these days. They need to cut down on the
>> boilerplate and increase the productivity.
>>
>> I'd certainly welcome any opinions on this - I've not planned to do
>> anything radical just yet.  Moving AspectJ to rebase it on the Eclipse
>> Java7 compiler will be keeping me busy.
>>
>> cheers
>> Andy
>>
>> On 18 August 2011 07:42, Steve Ash <stevemash@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > I'm actually embarrassed sending this, because I feel like this is a
>> > feature
>> > request that is really unrelated conceptually to the goals of AspectJ --
>> > but
>> > AspectJ is perfectly positioned (from a toolchain perspective) to be
>> > able to
>> > provide it.  So I'm shamelessly abandoning my philosophical consistency
>> > to
>> > see if there has been any talk of this type of feature in the AspectJ
>> > dev
>> > community before:
>> >
>> > Any talk of being able to somehow use weaving to allow for a "val"
>> > keyword
>> > similar to scala, c#, or (now) Lambok?
>> >
>> > I realize that this is not really "weaving" but softening exceptions
>> > isn't
>> > really either -- and AspectJ supports that.  Really I'm just having
>> > feature
>> > envy over those other tools and when Lambok demonstrated that they could
>> > do
>> > it just as an annotation processor (+ eclipse integration), then I'm
>> > just
>> > grasping for straws ready to use it.  I don't want to mix Lambok and
>> > AspectJ
>> > as I've heard horror stories, and I'm not really anxious to adopt any
>> > additional toolchain risk.
>> >
>> > Any thoughts in the community?
>> >
>> > Steve
>> >
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>> >
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