Tralfamadore: Unifying Source Code and Execution Experience (Short Paper)
Geoffrey Lefebvre, Brendan Cully, Michael J. Feeley, Norman C. Hutchinson, Andrew Warfield · 2009
Program source is an intermediate representation of software; it lies between a developer’s intention and the hardware’s execution.Despite advancesin languagesand development tools, source itself and the applications we use to view it remain an essentially static representation of software,fromwhichdeveloperscanspendconsiderableenergy postulatingactualbehavior. Emerging techniques in execution logging promise to provide large shared repositories containing high-fidelity recordingsofdeployed,productionsoftware.Tralfamadore 1 is a system that combines source and execution trace analysis to capitalize on these recordings, and to expose information from the “experience ” of real execution within the software development environment, allowing developers to inform their understanding of source based on how it behavesduringreal execution.