Designing an adaptable heterogeneous abstract machine by means of reflection

What we have noticed in our research work is that these platforms have heterogeneity, extensibility, platform porting and adaptability limitations caused by their monolithic designs. Most designs of common abstract machines are focused on supporting a fixed programming language and the computation model they offer is set to the one employed by the specific language. We have identified reflection as a basis for designing an abstract machine, capable of overcoming the previously mentioned limitations. Reflection is a mechanism that gives our platform the capability to adapt the abstract machine to different computation models and heterogeneous computing environments, not needing to modify its implementation. In this paper we present the reflective design of our abstract machine, example code extending the platform, a reference implementation, and a comparison between our implementation and other well-known platforms.