Supporting Language Interoperability by Dynamically Switched Behaviors.

Software programs are often written in more than one programming language as the emergence of domain specific languages testifies. Language interpreters are easily embeddable and performances are usually satisfactory. However, inter-language interaction remains a field tarnished by poor performances. The reason is that alien objects are wrapped, implying the use of expensive forwarding and converting mechanism. We propose to represent alien objects as the set of different states and behaviors it may have by moving between languages, thus avoiding wrapping and conversion. We have validated our solution on integration of Java and Smalltalk programming languages.