Enhancement through extension: the extension interpreter

Abstract

The ability to extend programs dynamically has clear advantages. However, providing efficient yet sufficiently flexible support for such capabilities system-wide presents significant challenges. We describe a design and implementation of an extension mechanism that depends heavily on interpretive techniques, including call arbitration, dynamic linking, and multilanguage extensions. We discuss these mechanisms in the context of our Extension Interpreter, which embodies our ideas and provides a framework for discussing the efficiency and generality of the implementation. Our current implementation runs under BSD UNIX 4.2 and 4.3 on VAXes and SUN workstations. Extensions can be written in both C and in Icon, demonstrating our ability to address problems both of compiled and interpreted languages.