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Design and implementation of a tracer driver: Easy and efficient dynamic analyses of constraint logic programs1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

LUDOVIC LANGEVINE  and
MIREILLE DUCASSÉ
LUDOVIC LANGEVINE
Affiliation:
Mission Critical IT, Boulevard de France, 9, Bât A, 1420 - Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium (e-mail: llg@missioncriticalit.com)
MIREILLE DUCASSÉ
Affiliation:
IRISA/INSA of Rennes, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042Rennes Cedex, France (e-mail: Mireille.Ducasse@irisa.fr)
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Abstract

Tracers provide users with useful information about program executions. In this article, we propose a “tracer driver”. From a single tracer, it provides a powerful front-end enabling multiple dynamic analysis tools to be easily implemented, while limiting the overhead of the trace generation. 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 in the context of constraint logic programming (CLP); experiments have been made within GNU-Prolog. Execution views provided by existing tools have been easily emulated with a negligible overhead. Experimental measures show that the flexibility and power of the described architecture lead to good performance. The tracer driver overhead is inversely proportional to the average time between two traced events. Whereas the principles of the tracer driver are independent of the traced programming language, it is best suited for high-level languages, such as CLP, where each traced execution event encompasses numerous low-level execution steps. Furthermore, CLP is especially hard to debug. The current environments do not provide all the useful dynamic analysis tools. They can significantly benefit from our tracer driver which enables dynamic analyses to be integrated at a very low cost.

Keywords

Software engineeringDebuggingExecution trace analysisExecution monitoringExecution tracingExecution visualizationProgramming environmentConstraint logic programming
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 8 , Issue 5-6 , November 2008 , pp. 581 - 609
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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