Which languages support class replacement?
- by Alix
Hi,
I'm writing my master thesis, which deals with AOP in .NET, among other things, and I mention the lack of support for replacing classes at load time as an important factor in the fact that there are currently no .NET AOP frameworks that perform true dynamic weaving -- not without imposing the requirement that woven classes must extend ContextBoundObject or MarshalByRefObject or expose all their semantics on an interface.
You can however do this in Java thanks to ClassFileTransformer:
You extend ClassFileTransformer.
You subscribe to the class load event.
On class load, you rewrite the class and replace it.
All this is very well, but my project director has asked me, quite in the last minute, to give him a list of languages that do / do not support class replacement. I really have no time to look for this now: I wouldn't feel comfortable just doing a superficial research and potentially putting erroneous information in my thesis.
So I ask you, oh almighty programming community, can you help out? Of course, I'm not asking you to research this yourselves. Simply, if you know for sure that a particular language supports / doesn't support this, leave it as an answer. If you're not sure please don't forget to point it out.
Thanks so much!
