Instrumenting annotated programs

Instrumentation is commonly used to track application behavior: to collect program profiles; to monitor component health and performance; to aid in component testing; and more. Program annotation enables developers and tools to pass extra information to later stages of software development and execution. For example, the .NET runtime relies on annotations for a significant chunk of the services it provides. Both mechanisms are evolving into important parts of software development in the context of modern platforms such as Java and .NET. Instrumentation tools are generally not aware of the semantics of information passed via the annotation mechanism. This is especially true for post-compiler, e.g., runtime, instrumentation. The problem is that instrumentation may affect the correctness of annotations, rendering them invalid or misleading, and producing unforeseen side-effects during program execution. This problem has not been addressed so far. In this paper, we show the subtle int...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Marina Biberstein, Vugranam C. Sreedhar, Bilha Mendelson, Daniel Citron, Alberto Giammaria
• Keywords: Annotation Enables Developers, Annotations, Instrumentation, VEE 2005, Virtualization