μ -DSU: A Micro-Language Based Approach to Dynamic Software Updating

Cazzola, Walter; Chitchyan, Ruzanna; Rashid, Awais; Shaqiri, Albert

doi:10.1016/j.cl.2017.07.003

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Current techniques to define statesA number of studies have demonstrated 12 techniques to define states in DSU including state transformer [45, 73, 83, 95, 115 ], formalise as state machine [9, 61, 83, 120 ], adaptation [41, 65 ], prepare ready tainted states [101 ], state convergence algorithm [126 ], state‐based specification language [83 ], enforcing restrictions [116 ], model checkers [83 ], using check points [37 ], custom state transfer [116 ], convert states bi‐directionally [42 ], and event‐based [66 ]. C. Existing techniques to transfer states in DSUBefore we list the identified states transformations techniques, it is interesting to mention number of techniques utilised in DSU to assist in states transformations in the selected primary studies, the techniques are including wrappers [16, 22, 43, 46, 52, 77, 94, 95 ], adaptation [4, 38, 41, 43, 59, 100, 129 ], refactoring [47, 50, 55, 74, 86, 99, 123 ], proxies [41, 46, 53, 113, 119, 131 ], class loaders [55, 85, 86, 123 ], in‐Place Proxification [43, 55, 91 ], adjustment [41, …”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also, number of authors have highlighted additional DSU approaches including dynamic replacement [22, 54, 66, 75, 86, 92, 93 ], dynamic instrumentation [52, 59, 60, 74, 84, 94 ], dynamic linking [37, 39, 53, 75, 83, 85 ], lust‐in‐time compilation [30, 44, 55, 58, 76, 95 ], wrapper [4, 40, 42, 44, 52 ], dynamic aspect‐oriented [35, 41, 50, 96, 97 ], extension of features [98, 99 ], dynamic adaptation [43, 59 ], rolling update [84 ], object transformer [49 ], data‐driven programming [92 ], distributed DSU [38 ], dynamic core library update [56 ], using run time to support DSU [92 ], procedure‐oriented [30 ], micro‐language‐based [100 ], and dynamic rebinding [5 ].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Before we list the identified states transformations techniques, it is interesting to mention number of techniques utilised in DSU to assist in states transformations in the selected primary studies, the techniques are including wrappers [16, 22, 43, 46, 52, 77, 94, 95 ], adaptation [4, 38, 41, 43, 59, 100, 129 ], refactoring [47, 50, 55, 74, 86, 99, 123 ], proxies [41, 46, 53, 113, 119, 131 ], class loaders [55, 85, 86, 123 ], in‐Place Proxification [43, 55, 91 ], adjustment [41, 68 ], reflection [85, 86 ], and publisher subscriber pattern [66, 121 ].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Dynamic software updating: a systematic mapping study

Ahmed

Lee

et al. 2020

IET softw.

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Dynamic software updating (DSU) is shifting gears to modify software systems without a halt. Even though extensive research has been conducted on DSU, it is necessary to synthesise and map the results of recent studies on DSU for prospective research highlights. This study aims to highlight the current state‐of‐the‐art, to recognise trends, and to identify existing open issues in DSU. A systematic mapping study (SMS) was conducted with a set of six research questions. A total of 1066 papers published from 2005 to 2019 were recorded. After a filtering process, 112 primary studies were selected and inspected. This study highlights the current state‐of‐the‐art of DSU including approaches, tools, models, and techniques. Also, this study outlines application domains, research type, and contributions type facets in DSU. In addition, this study demonstrates benchmarks, datasets, evaluation metrics, and existing open issues for future research in DSU. The results of this investigation can be used to highlight current state‐of‐the‐art of DSU, to show trends of DSU, and to demonstrate existing open issues in DSU.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Dynamic software updating: a systematic mapping study

Ahmed

Lee

et al. 2020

IET softw.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Systems where there is no compiler at run time will only support instrumentation before run time, or rely 5:9 on a hot code update mechanism. Hot update techniques are nowadays available for many languages such as, for example, C [38], Java [41] or Pharo [63], as well as for a large variety of systems [2,5,24,57,67,68].…”

Section: Cross-cuttingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

2020

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Context. Refining or altering existing behavior is the daily work of every developer, but that cannot be always anticipated, and software sometimes cannot be stopped. In such cases, unanticipated adaptation of running systems is of interest for many scenarios, ranging from functional upgrades to on-the-fly debugging or monitoring of critical applications.Inquiry. A way of altering software at run time is using behavioral reflection, which is particularly wellsuited for unanticipated adaptation of real-world systems. Partial behavioral reflection is not a new idea, and for years many efforts have been made to propose a practical way of expressing it. Many of these efforts resulted in practical solutions, but which introduced a semantic gap between the code that requires adaptation and the expression of the partial behavior.Approach. The idea of closing the gap between the code and the expression of the partial behavior led to the implementation of the Reflectivity framework. Using Reflectivity, developers annotate abstract syntax tree (AST) nodes with meta-behavior which is taken into account by the compiler to produce behavioral variations. Reflectivity is designed for dynamically typed systems which provide an AST representation of the program that is causally connected to the source code, and which support run-time recompilation. In this paper, we present Reflectivity, its API, its implementation in Pharo, its usage and limitations. We reflect on ten years of use of Reflectivity, and investigate in the literature how it has been used as a basic building block of many innovative ideas.Knowledge. Reflectivity has been used by 21 projects in the last decade, to implement reflective libraries or language extensions, code instrumentation, dynamic software update, debugging tools and software analysis tools. Our investigation shows that developers needed powerful and customized sets of heterogeneous reflection features for their projects, which Reflectivity provided. Despite its limitations, Reflectivity has proven to be a practical way of working with fine-grained reflective operations (at the AST level), and enabled a powerful way of dynamically add and modify behavior. By instrumenting through AST annotations, Reflectivity provides a flexible means to bridge the gap between the expression of the meta-behavior and the source code.Grounding. Reflectivity is actively used in research projects. During the past ten years, it served as a support for both implementation and fundamental base, for much research work including PhD theses, papers at conferences, workshops and in journals. Reflectivity is now an important library of the Pharo language, and is integrated in the standard distribution of the platform.Importance. Reflectivity exposes powerful abstractions to deal with behavioral adaptation, while providing a mature framework for unanticipated, non-intrusive, sub-method and partial behavioral reflection based on AST annotation. Finally, the AST annotation feature of Reflectivity opens new experimentation opportuni...

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“…Cazzola et al [70] recently proposed to move the evolution from the application level to the programming language level to support direct dynamic adaptations. They use Neverlang [71], a micro-language framework for modular language development.…”

Section: Dynamic Adaptationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fully Reflective Execution Environments: Virtual Machines for More Flexible Software

Chari

Garbervetsky

Marr

et al. 2019

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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VMs are complex pieces of software that implement programming language semantics in an efficient, portable, and secure way. Unfortunately, mainstream VMs provide applications with few mechanisms to alter execution semantics or memory management at run time. We argue that this limits the evolvability and maintainability of running systems for both, the application domain, e.g., to support unforeseen requirements, and the VM domain, e.g., to modify the organization of objects in memory. This work explores the idea of incorporating reflective capabilities into the VM domain and analyzes its impact in the context of software adaptation tasks. We characterize the notion of a fully reflective VM, a kind of VM that provides means for its own observability and modifiability at run time. This enables programming languages to adapt the underlying VM to changing requirements. We propose a reference architecture for such VMs and present TruffleMATE as a prototype for this architecture. We evaluate the mechanisms TruffleMATE provides to deal with unanticipated dynamic adaptation scenarios for security, optimization, and profiling aspects. In contrast to existing alternatives, we observe that TruffleMATE is able to handle all scenarios, using less than 50 lines of code for each, and without interfering with the application's logic.

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μ -DSU: A Micro-Language Based Approach to Dynamic Software Updating

Cited by 11 publications

References 53 publications

Dynamic software updating: a systematic mapping study

Dynamic software updating: a systematic mapping study

Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

Fully Reflective Execution Environments: Virtual Machines for More Flexible Software

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