Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Tuesday 10 May 2005

Light-Weight Instrumentation from Relational Queries Over Program Traces

Good news! OOPSLA 2005 has accepted our paper on Light-Weight Instrumentation From Relational Queries Over Program Traces by Simon Goldsmith, Alex Aiken and me. This is work I did with Simon in the (northern) summer of 2003 while he was an intern at IBM.

I'm glad to see this work get published; I think it's an exciting new area of research. The idea is to express dynamic program analyses (e.g., "how many times does function A get called during an invocation of function B") as SQL-like queries over a database containing a full trace of the program execution --- but instead of actually building such a database, our compiler translates the relational query into instrumentation code that gets injected into the program to evaluate the query on the fly as the program runs.


Comments

Manu
Sweet, congrats! I'll congratulate Simon in person :). Actually, I got a paper in too, so hopefully I'll see you there.