Dynamic mixin is a construct available in Ruby and other dynamic languages. It can be used as a base to implement a range of programming paradigms, such as dynamic aspect-oriented programming and context-oriented programming. However, the performance characteristics of current implementation of dynamic mixin in Ruby leaves much to be desired under condition of frequent dynamic mixin operations, global method cache and inline cache misses incur significant overhead. In this work we implemented fine-grained state tracking for CRuby 1. and were able to improve performance by more than six times on the microbenchmark exercising extreme case flowing 4 times to global method cache clearing, 28% to fine-grained state tracking and further 12% to inline cache miss elimination by caching alternating states. We demonstrated a small application using dynamic mixins that gets 48% improvement in performance from our techniques. We also implemented in C a more general delegation object models and proposed an algorithm of thread-local caching, which allows to reduce inline cache misses while permitting thread-local delegation changes.

The modularity of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been a controversial issue. To investigate this issue compared with object-oriented programming (OOP), we propose a simple language providing AOP mechanisms, which are enhanced traditional OOP mechanisms. We also present its formal system and then show that programs in this language can be only mostly modularly (i.e. separately) typechecked and compiled.We mention a source of this unmodularity and discuss whether or not it is appropriate to claim that AOP breaks modularity compared with OOP.