Specification-enhanced execution

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-57).Our goal is to provide a framework that allows the programmer to easily shift responsibility for certain aspects of the program execution to the runtime system. We present specification- enhanced execution, a programming and execution model that allows the programmer to describe certain aspects of program execution using high level specifications that the runtime is responsible for executing. With our approach, the programmer provides an implementation that covers certain aspects of program behavior and a set of specifications that cover other aspects of program behavior. We propose a runtime system that uses concolic (combined concrete and symbolic) execution to simultaneously execute all aspects of the program. We describe LogLog, a language we have designed for using this programming and runtime model. We present a case study applying this programing model to real-word data processing programs and demonstrate the feasibility of both the programming and runtime models.by Jean Yang.S.M