The CIAO Multi-Dialect Compiler and System: An Experimentation Workbench for Future (C)LP Systems

CIAO is an advanced programming environment supporting Logic and Constraint programming. It offers a simple concurrent kernel on top of which declarative and non-declarative extensions are added via librarles. Librarles are available for supporting the ISOProlog standard, several constraint domains, functional and higher order programming, concurrent and distributed programming, internet programming, and others. The source language allows declaring properties of predicates via assertions, including types and modes. Such properties are checked at compile-time or at run-time. The compiler and system architecture are designed to natively support modular global analysis, with the two objectives of proving properties in assertions and performing program optimizations, including transparently exploiting parallelism in programs. The purpose of this paper is to report on recent progress made in the context of the CIAO system, with special emphasis on the capabilities of the compiler, the techniques used for supporting such capabilities, and the results in the áreas of program analysis and transformation already obtained with the system

A Tool for Optimizing the Build Performance of Large Software Code Bases

We present Build Analyzer, a tool that helps developers optimize the build performance of huge systems written in C. Due to complex C header dependencies, even small code changes can cause extremely long rebuilds, which are problematic when code is shared and modified by teams of hundreds of individuals. Build Analyzer supports several use cases. For developers, it provides an estimate of the build impact and distribution caused by a given change. For architects, it shows why a build is costly, how its cost is spread over the entire code base, which headers cause build bottlenecks, and suggests ways to refactor these to reduce the cost. We demonstrate Build Analyzer with a use-case on a real industry code base.

A Model for Configuration Management of Open Software Systems

The article proposes a model for the configuration management of open systems. The model aims at validation of configurations against given specifications. An extension of decision graphs is proposed to express specifications. The proposed model can be used by software developers to validate their own configurations across different versions of the components, or to validate configurations that include components by third parties. The model can also be used by end-users to validate compatibility among different configurations of the same application. The proposed model is first discussed in some application scenarios and then formally defined. Moreover, a type discipline is given to formally define validation of a configuration against a system specificationComment: 13 page

Towards Actionable Visualization for Software Developers

Abundant studies have shown that visualization is advantageous for software developers, yet adopting visualization during software development is not a common practice due to the large effort involved in finding an appropriate visualization. Developers require support to facilitate that task. Among 368 papers in SOFTVIS/VISSOFT venues, we identify 86 design study papers about the application of visualization to relieve concerns in software development. We extract from these studies the task, need, audience, data source, representation, medium and tool; and we characterize them according to the subject, process and problem domain. On the one hand, we support software developers to put visualization in action by mapping existing visualization techniques to particular needs from different perspectives. On the other hand, we highlight the problem domains that are overlooked in the field and need more support