Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that implements crosscutting concerns in a modular way. People have witnessed the prosperity of AOP languages for Java and C++, such as AspectJ and AspectC++, which has propelled AOP to become an important programming paradigm with many interesting application scenarios, e.g., runtime verification. In contrast, the AOP languages for C are still poor and lack compiler support. In this paper, we design a new general-purpose and expressive aspect-oriented C programming language, namely Aclang, and implement a compiler for it, which brings fully-fledged AOP support into the C domain. We have evaluated the effectiveness and performance of our compiler against two state-of-the-art tools, ACC and AspectC++. In terms of effectiveness, Aclang outperforms ACC and AspectC++. In terms of performance, Aclang outperforms ACC in execution time and outperforms AspectC++ in both execution time and memory consumption.

@article{paperbot2541,
  title = {Design and Implementation of an Aspect-Oriented C Programming Language},
  author = {Zhe Chen and Yunlong Zhu and Zhemin Wang},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {8},
  number = {OOPSLA1},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1145/3649834}
}