Decoupling Application Logic from Persistent Memory Frameworks with AspectC++

Abstract

Over the past decade, various systems and software libraries have been developed that provide crash consistency on byte-addressable persistent memory. They often require programmers to adapt their code significantly or to use special compiler plugins. Constant innovation in this evolving field makes it desirable to be able to easily switch to more recent systems without massive code refactoring, and without changing compilers. In this paper, we show how aspect-oriented programming can be used to automatically apply crash consistency to normal, sparsely annotated C++ code. In two case studies, we find that our approach significantly reduces the amount of code required to apply state-of-the-art crash consistency frameworks such as PMDK libpmemobj++ and Pronto. © 2021 ACM.