skip to main content
10.1145/1734263.1734389acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessigcseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

The pep/8 memory tracer: visualizing activation records on the run-time stack

Published:10 March 2010Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a virtual machine simulator with a memory trace facility having two unique features. First, the machine is designed to illustrate the translation from C/C++ to assembly language and from thence to machine language. Instead of the more common memory dump labeled by address, the tracer displays a graphic representation of the cell labeled by its symbol. Second, the simulator displays in real time the growth of the run-time stack on function activation, detects and displays the boundaries of the activation record, and displays all the cells on the run-time stack labeled by symbol. The paper includes download information for the open-source application.

References

  1. Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA, 1995. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Ghezzi, C. and Jazayeri, M. Programming Language Concepts, third ed. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1998. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Knuth, D. E. The Art of Computer Programming. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1997. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Lindholm, T. and Yellin, F. The Java(TM) Virtual Machine Specification. Sun Microsystems, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, 1999. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. MARS, http://courses.missouristate.edu/KenVollmar/MARS/Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Null, L, and Lobur, J. Computer Organization and Architecture, second ed. Jones and Bartlett, Publishers, Inc. Sudbury, MA 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Patt, Y. N., and Patel, S. J. Introduction to Computing Systems, second ed. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Patterson, D. A. and Hennessy, J. L. Computer Organization and Design. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 2005. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. Qt, http://qt.nokia.com/Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. Rosenblum, M. The Reincarnation of Virtual Machines, ACM Queue, vol. 2, no. 5, July/August, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. SPIM, http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/spim.htmlGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Tanenbaum, A. S. Structured Computer Organization. Pearson Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Warford, J. S. Computer Systems. Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc. Sudbury, MA, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Yurcik, W., ed. Special Issue on Specialized Computer Architecture Simulators, Journal on Educational Resources in Computing, vol. 2, no. 1, March 2002. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. The pep/8 memory tracer: visualizing activation records on the run-time stack

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Login options

        Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

        Sign in
        • Published in

          cover image ACM Conferences
          SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
          March 2010
          618 pages
          ISBN:9781450300063
          DOI:10.1145/1734263

          Copyright © 2010 ACM

          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 10 March 2010

          Permissions

          Request permissions about this article.

          Request Permissions

          Check for updates

          Qualifiers

          • research-article

          Acceptance Rates

          Overall Acceptance Rate1,595of4,542submissions,35%

          Upcoming Conference

          SIGCSE Virtual 2024

        PDF Format

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader