Code generation using reflection

A couple of month ago, in late November I think, I got an idea when I was riding my bike home from work: using code generation to optimize code that normally relies on reflection. (To understand this post, you should at least now the basics basics of dynamic proxies. Check this out if you don't.)

A common pattern for me is to have an interface and generating the class(es) that implements it at runtime using a Dynamic Proxy. The behavior of the class defined by code that is parameterize by annotations on the interface. Example:

interface CommandLineArguments {

@ArgumentName({"c", "config"})
String configFileName();

@Argument({"x", "max")
String maxValue();

@Argument({"n", "min"})
String minValue();
}

The annotations on the methods in the interface defines what they should do simply by giving the name of the corresponding command line switch. Extremely terse, readable, and flexible code. If you ask me, this (annotated interfaces + dynamic proxies) is one of the best thing in the Java language.

The code that actually gets executed when the methods in the interface is called often rely heavily on reflection. Reflection, as everyone know who have ever used it, is very powerful but can also be very slow. Is there some way to make it a bit faster? Yes, there certainly is: code generation.

Lets take a simple but realistic example: for any interface, create a wrapper that print the name of the method and delegates to some other class that implements the same interface. The code for doing this look something like this:

import java.lang.reflect.InvocationHandler;

class InvocationPrinter implements InvocationHandler {
private Object delegateTo;

InvocationPrinter(Object delegateTo) {
this.delegateTo = delegateTo;
}

Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method, Object[] args) throws Throwable {
System.out.println(method.getName() + " called.");
return method.invoke(delegateTo, args);
}
}

This is a general but, unfortunately, slow. It is trivial to speed up, but this requires us to hand-write every method for every interface we wish to use this way. Another way, which gives the same speed-up, is to generate the same code dynamically. Literally the same code (except for indentation and such). Then using Javassist, this code can be compiled to a class at run-time, resulting in bytecode with the same performance as your hand-written code.

I have prototyped this approach for generating code by providing wrapper classes that looks and behaves just like java.lang.reflect.Method, java.lang.reflect.Constructor, etc, except that they also stores how they were used. For example, the class (called BIMethod) that corresponds to java.lang.reflect.Method stores the arguments used when invoking it and the returned object. By doing this you can write normal Java code that uses reflection (via these provided wrappers), but also generate (at run-time) the Java code that implements the same functionality. In fact, since the wrappers keep track of returned values, and created object (via Constructor.newInstance) it is possible to do fairly complex stuff like:

void doSomeReflectionStuff(Object[] args) {
DummyInterface obj = null;
for (final BIConstructor c : factory.constructors(Dummy.class)) {
try {
obj = (DummyInterface) c.newInstance(args[1], args[2]);
break;
} catch (final Exception e) {
}
}

final BIMethod someMethod = getSomeMethod();
return someMethod.invoke(obj, 0, args[0]);
}

That is, you reflectively invoke an object created using reflection. In addition, a constructor matching the arguments (the Object[] args) is found automatically by checking if the constructor threw an exception of not. The generated Java code for this will look something like this:

Dummy variable0 = new Dummy(arg1, arg2);
return variable0.theChosenMethod(0, arg0);

If you wish to take a peek at the prototype, just go ahead. Be aware, though, that is is probably the least tested stuff I'll written in quite a while... there a probably heaps of bugs... :) Despite this, I think it's worth taking a look at if you need to get more performance out of your reflection-based code. Please contact me if you have any questions or ideas.