An environment for dynamic component composition for efficient co-design

This paper describes the Balboa component integration environment that is composed of three parts: a script language interpreter, compiled C++ components, and a set of split-level interfaces to link the interpreted domain to the compiled domain. The environment applies the notion of split-level programming to relieve system engineers of software engineering concerns and to let them focus on system architecture. The script language is a Component Integration Language (CIL) because it implements a component model with introspection and loose typing capabilities. Component wrappers use split-level interfaces that implement the composition rules, dynamic type determination and type inference algorithms. Using an interface description language compiler automatically generates the split-level interfaces. The contribution of this work is two fold: an active code generation technique, and a three-layer environment that keeps the C++ components intact for reuse. We present an overview of the environment, demonstrate our approach by building three simulation models for an adaptive memory controller, and comment on code generation ratios.