Selector: A Language Construct for Developing Dynamic Applications

Fitting algorithms to meet input data characteristics and/or a changing computing environment is a tedious and error prone task. Programmers need to deal with code instrumentation details and implement the selection of which algorithm best suits a given data set. In this paper we describe a set of simple programming constructs for C that allows programmers to specify and generate applications that can select at run-time the best of several possible implementations based on measured run-time performance and/or algorithmic input values. We describe the application of this approach to a realistic linear solver for an engineering crash analysis code. The preliminary experimental results reveal that this approach provides an effective mechanism for creating sophisticated dynamic application behavior with minimal effort.