Typing abstractions and management in a component framework

ABSTRACT

We consider the type inference problems in a compositional design environment where the components are automatically instantiated from pre-existing C++-based intellectual property (IP) libraries. We present a component integration language based on scripting for design specification. Our focus is architectural aspects in specification that uses aggregation- as opposed to the more commonly used inheritance- for composition of components. Our approach simplifies architectural specification by employing a type inference and type management environment. We show that the type inference problem is NP-complete. We present a heuristic based on code generation and parameterization to solve the type inference for IP selection in our C++-based composition environment. We have implemented the composition and type management in the BALBOA framework. The results show the utility of our approach.

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