Fully-reflective VMS for ruling software adaptation

Chari, Guido; Garbervetsky, Diego; Marr, Stefan

doi:10.1109/icse-c.2017.144

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…From our experience [23], indirect adaptation leads to a number of issues: 1) the set of operations intercepted is usually an over-approximation of the points in the program that need adaptation; 2) maintainability is reduced because any application change can require a corresponding update to any interception point; 3) debugging is cumbersome because the application's methods could become polluted with instrumentation features; 4) composing adaptations can require complex run-time tests at each interception point reducing performance; 5) if an operation is not interceptable (i.e., built-in operations) it can not be adapted.…”

Section: Direct and Indirect Adaptationsmentioning

confidence: 93%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Fully Reflective Execution Environments: Virtual Machines for More Flexible Software

Chari

Garbervetsky

Marr

et al. 2019

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

VMs are complex pieces of software that implement programming language semantics in an efficient, portable, and secure way. Unfortunately, mainstream VMs provide applications with few mechanisms to alter execution semantics or memory management at run time. We argue that this limits the evolvability and maintainability of running systems for both, the application domain, e.g., to support unforeseen requirements, and the VM domain, e.g., to modify the organization of objects in memory. This work explores the idea of incorporating reflective capabilities into the VM domain and analyzes its impact in the context of software adaptation tasks. We characterize the notion of a fully reflective VM, a kind of VM that provides means for its own observability and modifiability at run time. This enables programming languages to adapt the underlying VM to changing requirements. We propose a reference architecture for such VMs and present TruffleMATE as a prototype for this architecture. We evaluate the mechanisms TruffleMATE provides to deal with unanticipated dynamic adaptation scenarios for security, optimization, and profiling aspects. In contrast to existing alternatives, we observe that TruffleMATE is able to handle all scenarios, using less than 50 lines of code for each, and without interfering with the application's logic.

show abstract

Section: Direct and Indirect Adaptationsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…ColumnarData is also responsible for creating the new instances of classes featuring a columnar representation (Lines [21][22][23][24][25][26]. At object creation time, we select a new index for the class arrays storing the data and create a kind of proxy storing only this index.…”

Section: Fast Aggregation With Columnar Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%