Tracing as a Service
A project I’ve been working on is called Spencer: http://spencer-t.racing. Spencer is a set of
tools with the aim to make it trivially easy for language designers, runtime
developers and other language technologists to understand the behaviour of
“typical” programs on the JVM.
Spencer contains a tool that works as a drop in replacement for java – it
starts and runs an application, but recompiles code dynamically to log
information about variable loads/stores, field loads/stores, and method
enters/exits. These events are tagged with the current thread id, a sequence
number, types of callees, and so on.
We are hosting the data as a web service for people to interact with. Users are able to query the web service by constructing, interactively, queries that select objects. These queries can be gradually refined using an accessible interface, and visualised in interactive plots.
Since data sets – once they are uploaded – never change, we can apply caching to these queries, which will lead (eventually) to the ability to analyse terabytes of data interactively. There are still some performance issues (mainly of the UI) that need solving.
Publications
There are two papers right now:
“Spencer: Interactive Heap Analysis for the Masses”
This paper is the suggested introductory paper. It covers the tool, its architecture, and two simple use cases that illustrate the capabilities of the system. To appear (International Conference on Mining Software Repositories 2017), preprint (pdf), citation (bib)
“Mining for Safety using Interactive Trace Analysis”
This paper is an application of Spencer; it mostly uses Spencer’s API to look for evidence for static properties that are hidden in Java programs. One example for this is looking for classes of which all instances (or none) fulfilled a certain property like uniqueness or immutability. For such classes, the existence of a static property might hold – we have generated a hypothesis. (Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages and Systems 2017) preprint (pdf), citation (bib), slides (pdf), slides (keynote).
Presentations
I presented Spencer, including a demo, at IWACO 2017, co-located with ECOOP and PLDI.
I presented the project at a meeting with some colleagues from Uppsala University’s computer architecture group:
Tobias gave a presentation that includes Spencer:
I presented an high level overview at an UpScale meeting in the fall of 2016: can find the slides below.