Using AOP to develop architectural-neutral operating system components

The architecture of an operating system, e.g. micro kernel or monolithic kernel, is usually seen as something static. Even during the long lasting evolution of operating system code it is extremely hard and, thus, expensive to change the architecture. However, our experience is that architectural evolution is often required and an architecture-neutral way to develop operating system components should be found. After analyzing why architectural flexibility is so difficult to achieve, we propose Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) as a solution. An example from the PURE OS family, which is implemented in an aspect-oriented programming language called AspectC++, will demonstrate the usefulness of the approach, which allows to separate the code that implements architectural properties from the core functionality.