RE: [abc-users] Using abc for instrumentation

Hi, Young.

> I'd like to know if abc is an appropriate tool for these
> purpose and if so, could someone please advice me of how to
> get started?

This really depends on the kind of instrumentation you want. Probably it
would even be enough to write a simple aspect to retrieve the
information you want.

If not, generally I can certainly say "yes", abc is a good tool to
achive those kind of things. The only question is if it is not a little
overkill to do so. There might be easier ways, e.g. using Soot (which
abc is built on top of).

I would say that it does only make sense to use abc if you have a
special purpose input language, e.g. a language that defines your
instrumentation. An example of this is J-LO
(http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/jlo/), which is built on top of abc.

If you have rather a *fixed* kind of instrumentation that you want to
apply different programs, then you might be better off with Soot, which
allows you to instrument programs using a BodyTransformer. (see the two
"profiling" tutorials on
http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/soot/tutorial/index.html)

So what kind of information do you want to retrieve? Is it static or
dynamic? Is it AspectJ specific or can it be inferred from Java
bytecode?

Hope that helps,

Eric

--
Eric Bodden
Sable Research Group, McGill University
Montreal, Canada
http://bodden.de