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Formally Efficient Program Instrumentation

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Runtime Verification (RV 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6418))

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Abstract

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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK

    Boris Feigin & Alan Mycroft

Authors
  1. Boris Feigin
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  2. Alan Mycroft
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK

    Howard Barringer

  2. INRIA, Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique, France

    Ylies Falcone

  3. Department of Computer Science, Saarland University, 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Bernd Finkbeiner

  4. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, M/S 3041-285, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, 91109, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Klaus Havelund

  5. PRECISE Center, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 19104, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Insup Lee  & Oleg Sokolsky  & 

  6. Department of Computer Science, University of Malta, MSD 06, Msida, Malta

    Gordon Pace

  7. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 N. Goodwin, 61801, Urbana, IL, USA

    Grigore Roşu

  8. Microsoft Research,, One Microsoft Way, 98052, Redmond, WA, USA

    Nikolai Tillmann

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Feigin, B., Mycroft, A. (2010). Formally Efficient Program Instrumentation. In: Barringer, H., et al. Runtime Verification. RV 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6418. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16612-9_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16612-9_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-16611-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-16612-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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