CppIns: A Source Query Language for Instrumentation

Abstract

Source instrumentation is one of the most common tasks used in software testing and dynamic program analysis. However, instrumentation fragments containing contextual information are scattered in source code and hard to be maintained. To generate and manager instrumentation codes, we divide the source instrumentation task into two parts, searching the instrumentation points where code fragments should be planted and generating the code fragments according to the contextual variables. Following such idea, we present a query-based method locating points where codes to be planted and collecting contextual information so that generated codes could contain variables around the points. The CppIns language provided by our method is aimed to specify instrumentation rules for C++ source, which is constructed following a SQL-like style and easily understood. We evaluate the method in terms of the reduced complexity of query specifications with several common instrumentation tasks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.