Strategies and techniques of freeze/melt

To design a software development environment with both the advantages of dynamic and static environments, we present the Freeze/Melt mechanism. Freeze is a process to convert a module designed maturely to native code, and melt is a process to restore a frozen module to the state of intermediate code. The essence of Freeze/Melt is to implement hybrid execution of interpreting and compiling in one environment. Aiming at OOPL, in this paper we first discuss two strategies of Freeze/Melt-freeze enclosure strategy and semi-freeze strategy, and then elaborate the dynamic and static interaction techniques, the key techniques to implement hybrid execution. Finally, MagicFrame, a prototype system, is introduced.