Persistent Storage for Program Metadata
Daniel Williams · 2011
Building a modern software system has increasingly become a complex and difficult to manage task.Typical software development systems involve dozens of tools to assist the programmer in building secure and robust programs.Many of these tools perform detailed analysis, collecting large amounts of program metadata to better understand the program and improve it.Unfortunately this metadata is often discarded immediately after the tool is finished running.By saving, organizing and making such metadata available across the software development toolchain, software developers can build new tools and improve existing tools with ease.To achieve this goal, this work presents Metaman, a system for metadata storage and retrieval.Metaman allows any tool in the toolchain to submit and query metadata about the program, avoiding duplication of analysis and saving data that was previously discarded.An important class of tools with specific metadata needs is the set of run-time tools.Many high-