Introduction of Program Instrumentation using Aspects

Morgan Deters and Ron K. Cytron

In Proceedings of the OOPSLA 2001 Workshop on Advanced Separation of Concerns in Object-Oriented Systems, Tampa, Florida, 14 October 2001.

Compilers and other program-analysis tools often rely on profiling information obtained from the programs they analyze. Obtaining such information can be a tedious task. The most detailed information is often obtained by arranging for code generators to instrument the code they generate or by collecting such information through instrumented interpretation. Access to code generators and interpreters is often beyond the capability of ordinary users. In this paper, we examine the advantages of using aspects for this purpose and present code that harvests runtime information for subsequent offline analysis.

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