TY - JOUR A1 - Perscheid, Michael A1 - Siegmund, Benjamin A1 - Taeumel, Marcel A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Studying the advancement in debugging practice of professional software developers JF - Software Quality Journal N2 - In 1997, Henry Lieberman stated that debugging is the dirty little secret of computer science. Since then, several promising debugging technologies have been developed such as back-in-time debuggers and automatic fault localization methods. However, the last study about the state-of-the-art in debugging is still more than 15 years old and so it is not clear whether these new approaches have been applied in practice or not. For that reason, we investigate the current state of debugging in a comprehensive study. First, we review the available literature and learn about current approaches and study results. Second, we observe several professional developers while debugging and interview them about their experiences. Third, we create a questionnaire that serves as the basis for a larger online debugging survey. Based on these results, we present new insights into debugging practice that help to suggest new directions for future research. KW - Debugging KW - Literature review KW - Field study KW - Online survey Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-015-9294-2 SN - 0963-9314 SN - 1573-1367 VL - 25 SP - 83 EP - 110 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Freudenberg, Bert A1 - Ingalls, Dan A1 - Felgentreff, Tim A1 - Pape, Tobias A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - SqueakJS A Modern and Practical Smalltalk that Runs in Any Browser JF - ACM SIGPLAN notices N2 - We report our experience in implementing SqueakJS, a bitcompatible implementation of Squeak/Smalltalk written in pure JavaScript. SqueakJS runs entirely in theWeb browser with a virtual file system that can be directed to a server or client-side storage. Our implementation is notable for simplicity and performance gained through adaptation to the host object memory and deployment leverage gained through the Lively Web development environment. We present several novel techniques as well as performance measurements for the resulting virtual machine. Much of this experience is potentially relevant to preserving other dynamic language systems and making them available in a browser-based environment. KW - Smalltalk KW - Squeak KW - Web browsers KW - JavaScript Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/10.1145/2661088.2661100 SN - 0362-1340 SN - 1558-1160 VL - 50 IS - 2 SP - 57 EP - 66 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bauman, Spenser A1 - Bolz, Carl Friedrich A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert A1 - Kirilichev, Vasily A1 - Pape, Tobias A1 - Siek, Jeremy G. A1 - Tobin-Hochstadt, Sam T1 - Pycket: A Tracing JIT for a Functional Language JF - ACM SIGPLAN notices N2 - We present Pycket, a high-performance tracing JIT compiler for Racket. Pycket supports a wide variety of the sophisticated features in Racket such as contracts, continuations, classes, structures, dynamic binding, and more. On average, over a standard suite of benchmarks, Pycket outperforms existing compilers, both Racket's JIT and other highly-optimizing Scheme compilers. Further, Pycket provides much better performance for Racket proxies than existing systems, dramatically reducing the overhead of contracts and gradual typing. We validate this claim with performance evaluation on multiple existing benchmark suites. The Pycket implementation is of independent interest as an application of the RPython meta-tracing framework (originally created for PyPy), which automatically generates tracing JIT compilers from interpreters. Prior work on meta-tracing focuses on bytecode interpreters, whereas Pycket is a high-level interpreter based on the CEK abstract machine and operates directly on abstract syntax trees. Pycket supports proper tail calls and first-class continuations. In the setting of a functional language, where recursion and higher-order functions are more prevalent than explicit loops, the most significant performance challenge for a tracing JIT is identifying which control flows constitute a loop-we discuss two strategies for identifying loops and measure their impact. KW - Experimentation KW - Languages KW - Measurement KW - Performance KW - JIT compilers KW - contracts KW - tracing KW - functional languages KW - Racket Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/2784731.2784740 SN - 0362-1340 SN - 1558-1160 VL - 50 IS - 9 SP - 22 EP - 34 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weiher, Marcel A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Polymorphic identifiers: uniform resource access in objective-smalltalk JF - ACM SIGPLAN notices N2 - In object-oriented programming, polymorphic dispatch of operations decouples clients from specific providers of services and allows implementations to be modified or substituted without affecting clients. The Uniform Access Principle (UAP) tries to extend these qualities to resource access by demanding that access to state be indistinguishable from access to operations. Despite language features supporting the UAP, the overall goal of substitutability has not been achieved for either alternative resources such as keyed storage, files or web pages, or for alternate access mechanisms: specific kinds of resources are bound to specific access mechanisms and vice versa. Changing storage or access patterns either requires changes to both clients and service providers and trying to maintain the UAP imposes significant penalties in terms of code-duplication and/or performance overhead. We propose introducing first class identifiers as polymorphic names for storage locations to solve these problems. With these Polymorphic Identifiers, we show that we can provide uniform access to a wide variety of resource types as well as storage and access mechanisms, whether parametrized or direct, without affecting client code, without causing code duplication or significant performance penalties. KW - Identifiers KW - REST KW - Uniform Access Principle KW - Extensibility Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/2508168.2508169 SN - 0362-1340 SN - 1558-1160 VL - 49 IS - 2 SP - 61 EP - 71 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Steinert, Bastian A1 - Thamsen, Lauritz A1 - Felgentreff, Tim A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Object Versioning to Support Recovery Needs Using Proxies to Preserve Previous Development States in Lively JF - ACM SIGPLAN notices N2 - We present object versioning as a generic approach to preserve access to previous development and application states. Version-aware references can manage the modifications made to the target object and record versions as desired. Such references can be provided without modifications to the virtual machine. We used proxies to implement the proposed concepts and demonstrate the Lively Kernel running on top of this object versioning layer. This enables Lively users to undo the effects of direct manipulation and other programming actions. KW - Programming Environments KW - Object Versioning KW - CoExist KW - JavaScript KW - Lively Kernel Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/2661088.2661093 SN - 0362-1340 SN - 1558-1160 VL - 50 IS - 2 SP - 113 EP - 124 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rein, Patrick A1 - Taeumel, Marcel A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Making the domain tangible BT - implicit object lookup for source code readability JF - Design Thinking Research N2 - Programmers collaborate continuously with domain experts to explore the problem space and to shape a solution that fits the users’ needs. In doing so, all parties develop a shared vocabulary, which is above all a list of named concepts and their relationships to each other. Nowadays, many programmers favor object-oriented programming because it allows them to directly represent real-world concepts and interactions from the vocabulary as code. However, when existing domain data is not yet represented as objects, it becomes a challenge to initially bring existing domain data into object-oriented systems and to keep the source code readable. While source code might be comprehensible to programmers, domain experts can struggle, given their non-programming background. We present a new approach to provide a mapping of existing data sources into the object-oriented programming environment. We support keeping the code of the domain model compact and readable while adding implicit means to access external information as internal domain objects. This should encourage programmers to explore different ways to build the software system quickly. Eventually, our approach fosters communication with the domain experts, especially at the beginning of a project. When the details in the problem space are not yet clear, the source code provides a valuable, tangible communication artifact. KW - Source Code Readability KW - Domain Objects KW - StackOverflow KW - Squeak KW - Custom Writable Class Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-3-319-60967-6 SN - 978-3-319-60966-9 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60967-6_9 SP - 171 EP - 194 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pape, Tobias A1 - Felgentreff, Tim A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert A1 - Gulenko, Anton A1 - Bolz, Carl Friedrich T1 - Language-independent Storage Strategies for Tracing-JIT-based Virtual Machines JF - ACM SIGPLAN notices N2 - Storage strategies have been proposed as a run-time optimization for the PyPy Python implementation and have shown promising results for optimizing execution speed and memory requirements. However, it remained unclear whether the approach works equally well in other dynamic languages. Furthermore, while PyPy is based on RPython, a language to write VMs with reusable components such as a tracing just-in-time compiler and garbage collection, the strategies design itself was not generalized to be reusable across languages implemented using that same toolchain. In this paper, we present a general design and implementation for storage strategies and show how they can be reused across different RPython-based languages. We evaluate the performance of our implementation for RSqueak, an RPython-based VM for Squeak/Smalltalk and show that storage strategies may indeed off er performance benefits for certain workloads in other dynamic programming languages. We furthermore evaluate the generality of our implementation by applying it to Topaz, a Ruby VM, and Pycket, a Racket implementation. KW - Implementation KW - collection types KW - memory optimization KW - dynamic typing Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/2816707.2816716 SN - 0362-1340 SN - 1558-1160 VL - 51 SP - 104 EP - 113 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Felgentreff, Tim A1 - Perscheid, Michael A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Implementing record and refinement for debugging timing-dependent communication JF - Science of computer programming N2 - Distributed applications are hard to debug because timing-dependent network communication is a source of non-deterministic behavior. Current approaches to debug non deterministic failures include post-mortem debugging as well as record and replay. However, the first impairs system performance to gather data, whereas the latter requires developers to understand the timing-dependent communication at a lower level of abstraction than they develop at. Furthermore, both approaches require intrusive core library modifications to gather data from live systems. In this paper, we present the Peek-At-Talk debugger for investigating non-deterministic failures with low overhead in a systematic, top-down method, with a particular focus on tool-building issues in the following areas: First, we show how our debugging framework Path Tools guides developers from failures to their root causes and gathers run-time data with low overhead. Second, we present Peek-At-Talk, an extension to our Path Tools framework to record non-deterministic communication and refine behavioral data that connects source code with network events. Finally, we scope changes to the core library to record network communication without impacting other network applications. KW - Distributed debugging KW - Record and replay KW - Dynamic analysis KW - Record and refinement Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2015.11.006 SN - 0167-6423 SN - 1872-7964 VL - 134 SP - 4 EP - 18 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rein, Patrick A1 - Ramson, Stefan A1 - Lincke, Jens A1 - Felgentreff, Tim A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Group-Based Behavior Adaptation Mechanisms in Object-Oriented Systems JF - IEEE software N2 - Dynamic and distributed systems require behavior adaptations for groups of objects. Group-based behavior adaptation mechanisms scope adaptations to objects matching conditions beyond class membership. The specification of groups can be explicit or implicit. KW - group-based behavior adaptation KW - lively groups KW - ContextErlang KW - entity-component-system KW - predicated generic functions KW - active layers KW - reactive object queries KW - context groups KW - implied methods KW - object-oriented languages KW - software engineering KW - software development KW - contextual-variability modeling Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2017.4121224 SN - 0740-7459 SN - 1937-4194 VL - 34 IS - 6 SP - 78 EP - 82 PB - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers CY - Los Alamitos ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mattis, Toni A1 - Beckmann, Tom A1 - Rein, Patrick A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - First-class concepts BT - Reified architectural knowledge beyond dominant decompositions JF - Journal of object technology : JOT / ETH Zürich, Department of Computer Science N2 - Ideally, programs are partitioned into independently maintainable and understandable modules. As a system grows, its architecture gradually loses the capability to accommodate new concepts in a modular way. While refactoring is expensive and not always possible, and the programming language might lack dedicated primary language constructs to express certain cross-cutting concerns, programmers are still able to explain and delineate convoluted concepts through secondary means: code comments, use of whitespace and arrangement of code, documentation, or communicating tacit knowledge.
Secondary constructs are easy to change and provide high flexibility in communicating cross-cutting concerns and other concepts among programmers. However, such secondary constructs usually have no reified representation that can be explored and manipulated as first-class entities through the programming environment.
In this exploratory work, we discuss novel ways to express a wide range of concepts, including cross-cutting concerns, patterns, and lifecycle artifacts independently of the dominant decomposition imposed by an existing architecture. We propose the representation of concepts as first-class objects inside the programming environment that retain the capability to change as easily as code comments. We explore new tools that allow programmers to view, navigate, and change programs based on conceptual perspectives. In a small case study, we demonstrate how such views can be created and how the programming experience changes from draining programmers' attention by stretching it across multiple modules toward focusing it on cohesively presented concepts. Our designs are geared toward facilitating multiple secondary perspectives on a system to co-exist in symbiosis with the original architecture, hence making it easier to explore, understand, and explain complex contexts and narratives that are hard or impossible to express using primary modularity constructs. KW - software engineering KW - modularity KW - exploratory programming KW - program KW - comprehension KW - remodularization KW - architecture recovery Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5381/jot.2022.21.2.a6 SN - 1660-1769 VL - 21 IS - 2 SP - 1 EP - 15 PB - ETH Zürich, Department of Computer Science CY - Zürich ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert A1 - Perscheid, Michael A1 - Haupt, Michael T1 - Explicit use-case representation in object-oriented programming languages JF - ACM SIGPLAN notices N2 - Use-cases are considered an integral part of most contemporary development processes since they describe a software system's expected behavior from the perspective of its prospective users. However, the presence of and traceability to use-cases is increasingly lost in later more code-centric development activities. Use-cases, being well-encapsulated at the level of requirements descriptions, eventually lead to crosscutting concerns in system design and source code. Tracing which parts of the system contribute to which use-cases is therefore hard and so limits understandability. In this paper, we propose an approach to making use-cases first-class entities in both the programming language and the runtime environment. Having use-cases present in the code and the running system will allow developers, maintainers, and operators to easily associate their units of work with what matters to the users. We suggest the combination of use-cases, acceptance tests, and dynamic analysis to automatically associate source code with use-cases. We present UseCasePy, an implementation of our approach to use-case-centered development in Python, and its application to the Django Web framework. KW - design KW - languages KW - use-cases KW - separation of concerns KW - traceability Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/2168696.2047856 SN - 0362-1340 VL - 47 IS - 2 SP - 51 EP - 60 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert A1 - Kawarnura, Katsuya T1 - Dynamic service adaptation JF - Software : practice & experience N2 - Change can be observed in our environment and in the technology we build. While changes in the environment happen continuously and implicitly, our technology has to be kept in sync with the changing world around it. Although we can prepare for some of the changes for most of them we cannot. This is especially true for next-generation mobile communication systems that are expected to support the creation of a ubiquitous society where virtually everything is connected and made available within an organic information network. Resources will frequently join or leave the network, new types of media or new combinations of existing types will be used to interact and cooperate, and services will be tailored to preferences and needs of individual customers to better meet their needs. This paper outlines our research in the area of dynamic service adaptation to provide concepts and technologies allowing for such environments. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KW - dynamic service adaptation KW - DSA KW - aspect-oriented programming KW - dynamic AOP Y1 - 2006 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.766 SN - 0038-0644 SN - 1097-024X VL - 36 IS - 11-12 SP - 1115 EP - 1131 PB - Wiley CY - Chichester ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Haupt, Michael A1 - Adams, Bram A1 - Timbermont, Stijn A1 - Gibbs, Celina A1 - Coady, Yvonne A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Disentangling virtual machine architecture N2 - Virtual machine (VM) implementations are made of intricately intertwined subsystems, interacting largely through implicit dependencies. As the degree of crosscutting present in VMs is very high, VM implementations exhibit significant internal complexity. This study proposes an architecture approach for VMs that regards a VM as a composite of service modules coordinated through explicit bidirectional interfaces. Aspect-oriented programming techniques are used to establish these interfaces, to coordinate module interaction, and to declaratively express concrete VM architectures. A VM architecture description language is presented in a case study, illustrating the application of the proposed architectural principles. Y1 - 2009 UR - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4124007 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-sen.2007.0121 SN - 1751-8806 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Steinert, Bastian A1 - Cassou, Damien A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - CoExist overcoming aversion to change preserving immediate access to source code and run-time information of previous development states JF - ACM SIGPLAN notices N2 - Programmers make many changes to the program to eventually find a good solution for a given task. In this course of change, every intermediate development state can of value, when, for example, a promising ideas suddenly turn out inappropriate or the interplay of objects turns out more complex than initially expected before making changes. Programmers would benefit from tool support that provides immediate access to source code and run-time of previous development states of interest. We present IDE extensions, implemented for Squeak/Smalltalk, to preserve, retrieve, and work with this information. With such tool support, programmers can work without worries because they can rely on tools that help them with whatever their explorations will reveal. They no longer have to follow certain best practices only to avoid undesired consequences of changing code. KW - Design KW - Experimentation KW - Human Factors KW - Continuous Testing KW - Continuous Versioning KW - Debugging KW - Evolution KW - Explore-first Programming KW - Fault Localization KW - Prototyping Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/2480360.2384591 SN - 0362-1340 VL - 48 IS - 2 SP - 107 EP - 117 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Steinert, Bastian A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Applying design knowledge to programming Y1 - 2012 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lincke, Jens A1 - Appeltauer, Malte A1 - Steinert, Bastian A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - An open implementation for context-oriented layer composition in ContextJS JF - Science of computer programming N2 - Context-oriented programming (COP) provides dedicated support for defining and composing variations to a basic program behavior. A variation, which is defined within a layer, can be de-/activated for the dynamic extent of a code block. While this mechanism allows for control flow-specific scoping, expressing behavior adaptations can demand alternative scopes. For instance, adaptations can depend on dynamic object structure rather than control flow. We present scenarios for behavior adaptation and identify the need for new scoping mechanisms. The increasing number of scoping mechanisms calls for new language abstractions representing them. We suggest to open the implementation of scoping mechanisms so that developers can extend the COP language core according to their specific needs. Our open implementation moves layer composition into objects to be affected and with that closer to the method dispatch to be changed. We discuss the implementation of established COP scoping mechanisms using our approach and present new scoping mechanisms developed for our enhancements to Lively Kernel. KW - ContextJS KW - Context-oriented programming KW - Open implementations KW - Dynamic adaptation KW - Scope Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2010.11.013 SN - 0167-6423 VL - 76 IS - 12 SP - 1194 EP - 1209 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert A1 - Steinert, Bastian A1 - Lincke, Jens T1 - Agile software development in virtual collaboration environments Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-3-642-13756-3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pape, Tobias A1 - Bolz, Carl Friedrich A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - Adaptive just-in-time value class optimization for lowering memory consumption and improving execution time performance JF - Science of computer programming N2 - The performance of value classes is highly dependent on how they are represented in the virtual machine. Value class instances are immutable, have no identity, and can only refer to other value objects or primitive values and since they should be very lightweight and fast, it is important to optimize them carefully. In this paper we present a technique to detect and compress common patterns of value class usage to improve memory usage and performance. The technique identifies patterns of frequent value object references and introduces abbreviated forms for them. This allows to store multiple inter-referenced value objects in an inlined memory representation, reducing the overhead stemming from meta data and object references. Applied to a small prototype and an implementation of the Racket language, we found improvements in memory usage and execution time for several micro-benchmarks. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Meta-tracing KW - JIT KW - Data structure optimization KW - Value classes Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2016.08.003 SN - 0167-6423 SN - 1872-7964 VL - 140 SP - 17 EP - 29 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -