Specialization patterns

Abstract

Design patterns offer many advantages for software development, but can introduce inefficiency into the final program. Program specialization can eliminate such overheads, but is most effective when targeted by the user to specific bottlenecks. Consequently, we propose that these concepts are complementary. Program specialization can optimize programs written using design patterns, and design patterns provide information about the program structure that can guide specialization. Concretely, we propose specialization patterns, which describe how to apply program specialization to optimize uses of design patterns. We analyze the specialization opportunities provided by specific uses of design patterns. Based on the analysis of each design pattern, we define the associated specialization pattern. These specialization opportunities can be declared using the specialization classes framework, developed previously. In our experiments, such specialization significantly improves performance.