Advertisement
Published in:
2010 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Formally Efficient Program Instrumentation
Authors : Boris Feigin, Alan Mycroft
Published in: Runtime Verification
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.
Select sections of text to find matching patents with Artificial Intelligence. powered by
Select sections of text to find additional relevant content using AI-assisted search. powered by
The term “instrumentation” refers to modification of a program or its runtime environment to make hidden details of execution visible. Instrumentation can severely compromise program execution speed. Frameworks like DTrace (Sun Microsystems) and VProbes (VMware) offer practical ways of addressing performance concerns, but there has been no formal understanding of what it means for instrumentation to be efficient. To fill this gap, we propose a criterion based on that of Popek and Goldberg for virtual machines and on our previous work relating this to Jones optimality of program specializers. We further suggest linguistic constraints on instrumentation code to enable more aggressive static optimization of dynamically instrumented programs.