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InterAspect: aspect-oriented instrumentation with GCC

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Abstract

We present the InterAspect instrumentation framework for GCC, a widely used compiler infrastructure. The addition of plug-in support in the latest release of GCC makes it an attractive platform for runtime instrumentation, as GCC plug-ins can directly add instrumentation by transforming the compiler’s intermediate representation. Such transformations, however, require expert knowledge of GCC internals. InterAspect addresses this situation by allowing instrumentation plug-ins to be developed using the familiar vocabulary of Aspect-Oriented Programming: pointcuts, join points, and advice functions. Moreover, InterAspect uses specific information about each join point in a pointcut, possibly including results of static analysis, to support powerful customized instrumentation. We describe the InterAspect API and present several examples that illustrate its practical utility as a runtime-verification platform. We also introduce a tracecut system that uses InterAspect to construct program monitors that are formally specified as regular expressions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Part of the research described herein was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JP), California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Research described here was supported in part by AFOSR Grant FA9550-09-1-0481, NSF Grants CCF-0926190, CCF-0613913, CNS-0831298, and CNS-0509230, and ONR Grants N00014-07-1-0928 and N00014-09-1-0651.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA

    Justin Seyster, Ketan Dixit, Xiaowan Huang, Radu Grosu, Scott A. Smolka, Scott D. Stoller & Erez Zadok

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA

    Klaus Havelund

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  1. Justin Seyster
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  2. Ketan Dixit
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  3. Xiaowan Huang
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  4. Radu Grosu
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  5. Klaus Havelund
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  6. Scott A. Smolka
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  7. Scott D. Stoller
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  8. Erez Zadok
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Correspondence to Justin Seyster.

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Seyster, J., Dixit, K., Huang, X. et al. InterAspect: aspect-oriented instrumentation with GCC. Form Methods Syst Des 41, 295–320 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-012-0171-3

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