A tracer driver for hybrid execution analyses

ABSTRACT

Tracers provide users with useful information about program executions. In this paper we propose a "tracer driver", from a single tracer, it provides a powerful front-end for multiple dynamic analysis tools while limiting the overhead of the trace generation. The tracer driver can be used both synchronously and asynchronously. The relevant execution events are specified by flexible event patterns and a large variety of trace data can be given either systematically or "on demand". The proposed tracer driver has been designed and experimented in the context of constraint logic programming, within GNU-Prolog. Its principles are, however, independent of the traced programming language. Experimental measures show that the flexibility and power of the described architecture are also the basis of reasonable performances.

REFERENCES

• 1: Mikhail Auguston , Clinton Jeffery , Scott Underwood, A Framework for Automatic Debugging, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering, p.217, September 23-27, 2002
• 2: Thoms Bell, The concept of dynamic analysis, Proceedings of the 7th European software engineering conference held jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.216-234, September 06-10, 1999, Toulouse, France
• 3: B. Bruegge and P. Hibbard. Generalized path expressions: A high-level debugging mechanism. The Journal of Systems and Software, 3:265--276, 1983. Elsevier.
• 4: M. Consens, M. Hasan, and A. Mendelzon. Visualizing and querying distributed event traces with {Hy+. In W. Litwin and T. Risch, editors, Applications of Databases, 1st Int. Conf. Springer, LNCS, Vol. 819, 1994.
• 5: Mireille Ducassé, Coca: an automated debugger for C, Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, p.504-513, May 16-22, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States
• 6: Steven T. Hackstadt , Allen D. Malony, DAQV: distributed array query and visualization framework, Theoretical Computer Science, v.196 n.1-2, p.289-317, April 6, 1998 [doi>10.1016/S0304-3975(97)00205-3 ]
• 7: Mary Jean Harrold , Gregg Rothermel , Rui Wu , Liu Yi, An empirical investigation of program spectra, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering, p.83-90, June 16-16, 1998, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 8: Clinton L. Jeffery , Ralph E. Griswold, A framework for execution monitoring in Icon, Software—Practice & Experience, v.24 n.11, p.1025-1049, Nov. 1994 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380241104]
• 9: L. Langevine and M. Ducassé. A tracer driver to enable concurrent dynamic analyses. Research report, 5611, INRIA, 2005.
• 10: L. Langevine, M. Ducassé, and P. Deransart. A propagation tracer for {Gnu-Prolog: from formal definition to efficient implementation. In Proc. of the 19th Int. Conf. on Logic Programming. Springer, LNCS 2916, 2003.
• 11: Steven P. Reiss , Manos Renieris, Encoding program executions, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering, p.221-230, May 12-19, 2001, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Tracing; Monitors; Debugging aids
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Interactive environments; Integrated environments

General Terms:
Design, Languages

Keywords:
debugging, monitoring, tracer, visualization