Description Simone Gianni 2009-11-30 10:34:01 EST

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009010218 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.5
Build Identifier: 20090619-0625 AspectJ 1.6.6

Thanks to Oliver Hoff for reporting this.

When @annotation(x) is used to extract an annotation in a pointcut, AspectJ weaves the following code :

   49:  ldc     #1; //class tests/SampleProgram
   51:  ldc     #92; //String calc
   53:  iconst_0
   54:  anewarray       #74; //class java/lang/Class
   57:  invokevirtual   #78; //Method java/lang/Class.getDeclaredMethod:(Ljava/lang/String;[Ljava/lang/Class;)Ljava/lang/reflect/Method;
   60:  ldc     #71; //class tests/Log
   62:  invokevirtual   #84; //Method java/lang/reflect/Method.getAnnotation:(Ljava/lang/Class;)Ljava/lang/annotation/Annotation;
   65:  checkcast       #71; //class tests/Log
   68:  invokevirtual   #91; //Method tests/Intercept.ajc$afterReturning$tests_Intercept$2$74fc38c9:(Ltests/Log;)V

Which uses getDeclaredMethod to find the current method. 

If however the @annotation(x) is not used, and the annotation is extracted inside the advice using 

Log log = (Log) ((MethodSignature) thisJoinPointStaticPart.getSignature()).getMethod().getAnnotation(Log.class);           

this is 10 times faster than the code produced by AspectJ.

This makes using @annotation a performance problem, while it could probably be optimized in two ways :
- Use thisJoinPointStaticPart to make it a performance-equivalent
- Annotation could even be cached and reused, without calling getAnnotation every time, to make it even more efficient.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. See attached sample project
2. Comment/uncomment the two advices in Intercept.aj