Lors des journées du GDR-GPL 2021, le 8 juin 2021 :

1 - Présentation du GT debugging

Steven Costiou - CRIStAL – Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL.
Benoit Combemale - Diverse – Univ Rennes, CNRS, Inria, IRISA - UMR 6074.

Abstract

Le GT debugging a pour objectif de rassembler dans une même communauté tout chercheur, ingénieur, équipe industrielle ou du GDR qui s’intéresse aux problèmes du debugging logiciel. Il s’inscrit dans la communauté du GDR Génie de la Programmation et du Logiciel (GPL) du CNRS. Durant cette présentation, nous introduiront le groupe, ses objectifs scientifiques et son organisation

2 - Monilogging for Executable DSL

Dorian Leroy - Diverse – Univ Rennes, CNRS, Inria, IRISA - UMR 6074. slides

Abstract

Les techniques dites de “runtime monitoring” et de “logging” sont centrales à l’analyse et à la supervision du comportement de programmes informatiques. Cependant, développer un support adéquat pour ces techniques entraîne des coûts importants qui peuvent décourager les ingénieurs de langages dédiés d’offrir ces capabilités aux utilisateurs de leur langage. De plus, ces deux techniques sont généralement considérées comme indépendantes et sont donc implémentées sé- parément, ce qui nuit à l’exploitation de leurs complémentarités. Pour répondre à ces problèmes, nous proposons MoniLog, un langage permettant de définir des loggers, des moniteurs, et des combinaisons des deux (i.e., des moniloggers), de façon agnostique au langage utilisé.

3 - Sub-method, portable behavioural reflection with Reflectivity: looking back on 10 years of use

Steven Costiou, Vincent Aranega, Marcus Denker - HUAWEI technologies France. youtube

Abstract

This talk was given by Marcus Denker at the programming conference in March 2021 Refining or altering existing behavior is the daily work of every developer, but that cannot be always anticipated, and software sometimes cannot be stopped. In such cases, unanticipated adaptation of running systems is of interest for many scenarios, ranging from functional up- grades to on-the-fly debugging or monitoring of critical applications. A way of altering software at run time is using behavioral reflection, which is particularly well- suited for unanticipated adaptation of real-world systems. Partial behavioral reflection is not a new idea, and for years many efforts have been made to propose a practical way of expressing it. All these efforts resulted in practical solutions, but which introduced a semantic gap between the code that requires adaptation and the expression of the partial behavior. For example, in Aspect-Oriented Programming, a pointcut description is expressed in another language, which introduces a new distance between the behavior expression (the Advice) and the source code in itself. Ten years ago, the idea of closing the gap between the code and the expression of the partial behavior led to the implementation of the Reflectivity framework. Using Reflectivity, developers annotate Ab- stract Syntax Tree (AST) nodes with meta-behavior which is taken into account by the compiler to produce behavioral variations. In this paper, we present Reflectivity, its API, its implementation and its usage in Pharo. We reflect on ten years of use of Reflectivity, and show how it has been used as a basic building block of many innovative ideas. Reflectivity brings a practical way of working at the AST level, which is a high-level repre- sentation of the source code manipulated by software developers. It enables a powerful way of dynamically add and modify behavior. Reflectivity is also a flexible mean to bridge the gap between the expression of the meta-behavior and the source code. This ability to apply unan- ticipated adaptation and to provide behavioral reflection led to many experiments and projects during this last decade by external users. Existing work use Reflectivity to implement reflective libraries or languages extensions, featherweight code instrumentation, dynamic software update, debugging tools and visualization and software analysis tools.

Reflectivity is actively used in research projects. During the past ten years, it served as a support, either for implementation or as a fundamental base, for many research work including PhD theses, conference, journal and workshop papers. Reflectivity is now an important library of the Pharo language, and is integrated at the heart of the platform. Reflectivity exposes powerful abstractions to deal with partial behavioral adaptation, while pro- viding a mature framework for unanticipated, non-intrusive and partial behavioral reflection based on AST annotation. Furthermore, even if Reflectivity found its home inside Pharo, it is not a pure Smalltalk-oriented solution. As validation over the practical use of Reflectivity in dynamic object-oriented languages, the API has been ported to Python. Finally, the AST annotation feature of Reflectivity opens new experimentation opportunities about the control that developers could gain on the behavior of their own software

4 - Table ronde

Steven Costiou - CRIStAL – Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL.
Benoit Combemale - Diverse – Univ Rennes, CNRS, Inria, IRISA - UMR 6074.

Abstract

Lors de cette table ronde, nous échangerons sur les thèmes suivants :

  • Pour les nouveaux participants, qu’attendez-vous d’un GT sur le debugging ?
  • Quels défis souhaitez vous voir aborder ?
  • Comment ouvrir les problématiques du debugging aux autres GT ? Que pouvons nous leur apporter ? De quoi le debugging a besoin venant d’autres domaines ou thématiques ?
  • Quelles actions pour la suite du GT ?
  • Discussion ouverte