News:

• The abc web site and svn repository has migrated from Oxford to McGill. Please update your links to refer to http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/abc.
• New paper Dependent Advice: A General Approach to Optimizing History-based Aspects available

Latest version: 1.3.0, released on April 2nd, 2008

abc is a complete implementation of AspectJ (with some, mostly minor, differences to the original ajc compiler) that aims to make it easy to implement both extensions and optimisations of the core language. It provides two frontends: one built on the Polyglot framework for extensible Java compilation, the other an extension of the JastAddJ extensible Java compiler. Its backend is built on the Soot framework for Java optimisation.

For developers, abc offers:

• Fast code
• Alternative error messages
• Support through email lists and public bugzilla

For researchers, abc offers:

• An extensible frontend based on Polyglot
• An extensible backend based on Soot
• An ideal platform for experiments with new features and optimisations

abc is a joint project between the Programming Tools Group at Oxford University and the Sable research group, mainly based at McGill University in Montreal. It is free software, licensed under the GNU LGPL. We encourage people both to use it as an alternative AspectJ implementation and to extend and improve it.