Abstract: Methods and systems are described herein for extending configuration dependent extensible software programs. Classes of a core extensible software program may be extended by adding a configuration dependent extension. The extensions may be added statically prior to compiling the core version of a software program or dynamically at runtime. The declaration of extensible core classes may include an extensibility attribute with an indication of whether the class is statically extensible or dynamically extensible. An object description language is also described herein for appropriately declaring configuration dependent extensible classes. Also, a pre-processor is described herein for processing the object description language to generate a source code representation of the extensible class declarations and their extensions. The source code representation may then be used to generate the extended version of the core software program.

Abstract: Apparatus, methods, systems and computer program products are disclosed that provide an efficient mechanism for invoking a programmed operation at the first active use of the OOP object or data structure. The programmed operation can be used to initialize an object-oriented programming (OOP) object or data structure. The first active use of the data structure or OOP object is detected because the initial access mechanism is constrained to cause a misaligned memory access fault (trap) by attempting a non-byte access-mode memory access to an odd byte address. As the fault is processed, the access mechanism is converted so that the initial and subsequent non-byte access-mode memory accesses will succeed. In addition, the OOP object or data structure is initialized. Then the initial access attempt is repeated on the just initialized OOP object or data structure using the converted access mechanism.