Delegation-based Mixin Composition Synthesis

ABSTRACT. In the object oriented world existing inheritance concepts have been extended by mixins to assist modular software design. Actually, most languages only have limited mixin support. We use staged computation proposed by Davies and Pfenning together with a specification following an interface based design pattern to introduce mixins to Java 8. We present a synthesis based approach for mixin composition guided by user annotated semantics translated to intersection types. Synthesis results in meaningful Java code utilizing delegation to augment existing classes with mixin features.