[abc] draft message

what do you think?

---------------------------

to pql group, ptql group, klaus havelund, darmstadt group, object/teams,
douence-sudholt-fradet,

Dear all,

I'm writing to you because over the past few months we've
been discussing instrumentation tools where the instrumentation
is based on trace properties. There is a very large variety of
such tools, all with different formalisms for specifying
the trace properties, and with different implementation
techniques.

This stuff is very cool - but we need to assess its merits in
practice. For example, one could argue that such instrumentation
could be adequately done in existing AOP languages like Aspect/J
and Caesar/J; inspecting the history is just not necessary and
too costly at runtime... The only way to decide the question
is a careful evaluation on a significant number of case studies.

It would be a great help for all of us to have a central
repository of such examples where trace-based instrumentation
is applied to interesting systems. That repository can then be
a start for studies of the expressiveness of the formalisms used
to express trace properties, of the performance of different
implementation techniques, and so on.

Each example should come with:
 - a description of what it does
 - the specification for generating the instrumentation
 - the base program to be instrumented
 - scripts for doing the instrumentation
 - scripts for running the program
 - if your instrumentation tool is not publicly
   available on the web, an executable for it

In first instance, the repository would be shared with
all recipients of this message. The more different people
contribute, the greater the value for us all, so do let me
know if you feel I have missed someone out.

If you are interested in collaborating on this repository,
let me know, and we (the abc group) will set it up. I'm sure
it will generate a lot of interesting work!

Many thanks,

-Oege de Moor
(on behalf of the abc team)
Received on Tue Jan 31 16:58:53 2006