Performing effective software development and maintenance are best achieved with effective tool support. Provided by a variety of tools, each one presenting a specific kind of information supporting the task at hand. The goal of the first PLOMO was to develop new meta tools to improve and bring synergy in the existing infrastructure of Pharo (for software development) and the Moose software analysis platform (for maintenance). With PLOMO2, we build on top of this work and invent a new generation of tools to navigate and profile programs

Bergel, A

Denker, Marcus

Ducasse, Stéphane

Fabry, J

Hal-Diderot

PLOMO2 Associate Team Final Report

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HAL Id: hal-01389983https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01389983Submitted on 31 Oct 2016HAL is a multi-disciplinary open accessarchive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come fromteaching and research institutions in France orabroad, or from public or private research centers.L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, estdestinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documentsscientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,émanant des établissements d’enseignement et derecherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoirespublics ou privés.PLOMO2 Associate Team Final ReportA Bergel, Stéphane Ducasse, Marcus Denker, J FabryTo cite this version:A Bergel, Stéphane Ducasse, Marcus Denker, J Fabry. PLOMO2 Associate Team Final Report.[Research Report] INRIA. 2016. ￿hal-01389983￿PLOMO2 Associate Team final reportA. Bergel S. Ducasse M. Denker J. FabryOctober 27, 2016Associate Team acronym: PLOMO2Period of activity: 2014-2016Principal investigator (Inria): S. Ducasse – RMoD – Lille Nord EuropePrincipal investigator (partner): A. Bergel – DCC – Pleiad – University of Chile.Other participants: M. Denker (RMoD), J. Fabry (DCC), D. Pollet (RMoD), R. Robbes(DCC).Project OverviewPerforming effective software development and maintenance are best achieved with effectivetool support. Provided by a variety of tools, each one presenting a specific kind of informationsupporting the task at hand. The goal of the first PLOMO was to develop new meta tools toimprove and bring synergy in the existing infrastructure of Pharo (for software development)and the Moose software analysis platform (for maintenance). With PLOMO2, we build on topof this work and invent a new generation of tools to navigate and profile programs. The workwas carried out in three work packages:• Work Package One: Reflective Foundations• Work Package Two: Visualizations Engines• Work Package Three: Tools for Analyzing Dynamic Information(combining work package one and two).11 Original Project Plan1.1 Work Package OneFor both for program profiling and programmer activity recording, we need a way to deeplyhook into the system. We plan for this to improve the reflective infrastructure of Pharo.During the previous period we worked on OPAL, a new compiler toolchain for Pharo. Inessence the work on the compiler framework does not move forward the state of the art incompiler technology. However it has already been proven to be a crucial building block. Itprovided the fundamentals for many research experiments and new features for Pharo. Forexample, Pleiad and RMoD collaborated on a novel type system for Pharo that was realizedusing the new compiler infrastructure. Other examples are the many new features of Pharo 3that use parts of the new compiler chain, like AST-based navigation in the editor or breakpoints.The Opal flexible compiler infrastructure will allow us to build a new generation of reflec-tive infrastructure. Such infrastructure is keys to support tools (profilers) and new languagedesign (AOP, proxies, isolation). We are now in a position to perform a new iteration on thereflective layer and metaobject protocol for Pharo. In 2005 we started to develop new reflectivefoundations and we learned a lot (partial reflection, metalevel recursion handling, object-centricon the fly propagation, proxies, isolation). We are now in a situation to step back and redesignthe reflective layer based on all the cases we identified and developed.The results of this work package will be used and thus validated by WP3. In addition,we plan to realize the next generation of the AOP framework Phantom using the reflectionframework. This especially makes sure that the framework is general and not just limited forthe use in tools.1.2 Work Package TwoPlomo made a lot of progress by realizing the Roassal visualisation framework. We plan toenhance the infrastructure to visually render software-related data. We will investigate twocomplementary directions:1. Interaction and scalability in Roassal 2D. Roassal is an Agile Visualization Engine thatoffers large range of options to make the user interact with the visualization. Visualizationsoftware require particular customizations to cope with large amount of data. Navigationshould support interactive and semantic zooming, which is an essential feature for navi-gating large amount of data elements. Additional layers, including drawing dependencymatrices, vectorial and interactive charts are required2. Visual representation of 3D environment gives a sensation of immersion that is oftenkey to identify some patterns in a data structure. Current programming environmentsexploiting 3D are either fixed to a particular representation or unfit to be used as the baseof a programming environment1.3 Work Package ThreeThe goal of the third work package is to build on top of both WP1 and WP2: Combiningdynamic information with visualization to improve the development environment.1. Visualization to navigate and browse source code – System complexity is a polymetricview efficient at representing class hierarchies in a software source code. It has beenshown that system complexity is effective for software maintenance. We will augment therange of application of it by using it to navigate and browser application source code.22. Visualizing dynamic information to navigate source code. The static view of code shouldbe enhanced with dynamic information gathered from program execution. A good examplehere is visualization of profiling and tracing information.3. Context based on history – It has been shown that analyzing past user actions may pre-cisely infer what will be the next user actions. Unfortunately, history is poorly supportedin traditional programming environment. Making history a first class element in theprogramming environment is the topic of this work package.This work package will validate both WP1 and WP2.2 Results2.1 Work Package One Achievements: Reflective FoundationsProgress on a new iteration on the reflective layer and metaobject protocol for Pharo: Wehave implemented the Slots Mechanism in Pharo, which resulted in a first-class reificationof instance variables and their accessing through assignment and reading. This allows us tohook into reading and writing of instance variables and perform meta-level operations on them,e.g., adding breakpoints to the reading of a specific instance var, or a transparent notificationmechanism for when a specific instance variable is written. The latter can be used, e.g., inWP3 to dynamically update a visualization of the object that contains the instance variablewhenever the variable changes.Reflective operations in the form of meta-links can be added to any expression tree. Allvariables can now be annotated with meta data. Reflectivity has been improved to allow Meta-Links to be put on First Class Variables. All work has been integrated in Pharo5 developmentand is used already by other projects of RMOD and a research project of the University ofLugano/Switzerland. The stay of Marcus Denker in Chile in November 2015 had the goal tomake the new reflective infrastructure to be reliable enough for other PLOMO sub projects touse (namely LRP and Profilers). A breakpoint system based on Metalinks has been added toPharo5 and is being improved for the release of Pharo6.The object layout functionality of Pharo allowed us to work on supporting C-Types. TheOpal Compiler was extended with primitive types and to emit new low-level bytecode instruc-tions. Combined, this allows performance for use-cases like 2D and 3D frameworks to be speedup by 50-400% [13].2.2 Work Package Two Achievements: Visualizations EnginesTwo complementaries axes were investigated. Roassal 2D is a visualization engine to renderdata. Roassal 2D is employed to visualize any arbitrary set of data, including software-relateddata [5, 9] (e.g., source code, module dependencies), numerical set of numbers [6] (e.g., metricvalues). Roassal 2D has been improved from the interaction and scalability point of view.Roassal 2D is regularly used to visualize software systems large of thousands of classes.The second axis is the visualization in 3D. For that purpose, we have improved the FFIsupport of Pharo to use external libraries. With that, we created binding to SDL2 which allowedto move the window management code from the Virtual Machine to Pharo (OSWindow). The 2Dinfrastructure work (OSWindow) has been taken up by another Project (Inria in collaborationwith Thales). It has been extended with multi-touch support and a gesture engine. Besidespre-defined low level gestures (e.g., pinch or multi-finger swipe), the engine is extensible withuser-defined gestures. The Woden 3D graphics engine is a first demo that uses this foundation3to bring the ideas of Roassal to 3D. The new next generation graphics frameworks like Metaland Vulcan where the driving force to revisit Woden. The new framework Woden 2 uses thelowcode subsystem (see WP1) for a new generation, high perfomance 3D framework for Pharo.This will be the foundation of Roassal3D soon. Woden has already seen use outside of thePLOMO project, for example it is used for experiments with virtual reality at a large frenchmulti-national company.2.3 Work Package Three Achievements: Tools for Analyzing Dynamic In-formationLive Robot Programming (LRP) [10] as a case for the first two points of WP3: Visualizationto navigate and browse source code, Visualizing dynamic information to navigate source code.Firstly, in LRP the (Domain-Specific) source code is shown in a (Domain-Specific) visualizationmade in Roassal2 and Spec. Clicking on the entities in the visual representation causes anavigation action in the source code of the program. Secondly, in the LRP visualization thedynamic information of the state of variables in scope is shown, as well as which piece of thecode is currently running, and this is partially enabled by Slots. The visit of Marcus Denker toChile in spring 2015 helped to make serious progress on the base implementation infrastructure:The LRP prototype now is based in the First Class Variables (Slots and Globals) that areavailable in Pharo.We worked on refining the user interface framework Spec [4,16], together with its integra-tion with the visualization of dynamic information using Roassal as well as the GT Inspectorframework for the analysis of live objects. The goal is to allow a developer to build his owncustom user interface for the visualization of dynamic information, easily combining classicalUI widgets with more advanced visualizations (provided by Roassal and/or the powerful objectinspection and modification abilities of the GT Inspector). One example of a specific UI builtthis way is the work of Fabry and Sinclair [14] allowing the analysis of the dynamic evolutionof simulated object trajectories in different physics engines e.g., the Siconos engine by INRIABipop. This work on Spec is enhanced by the writing of extensive documentation on the frame-work, which was shown to be necessary for developers to effectively be able to construct suchuser interfaces.2.4 Work outside of work packagesClose proximity among the researchers also allowed work outside of the work packages to bestarted. One example is a preliminary effort in speeding up collections handling [12], anotherthe work on identifying classes in legacy JavaScript code [15].3 Production3.1 Software• Pharo: Pharo3 has been released Spring 2014, http://pharo.org• Pharo: Pharo4 has been released Spring 2015.• OSWindow has been integrated in Pharo4.• Pharo: Pharo5 has been released Spring 2016, Pharo6 has seen active development witha release planned for early 2017.4• Reflectivity has been integrated in Pharo5• Moose: Version 5.0 was released. http://moosetechnology.org• Moose: Version 6.0 was released.• Roassal2D: Fully based on Athens, the vector graphics support in Pharo• Roassal3D: first version of a 3D version of Roassal. https://vimeo.com/141916068• Woden: a 3D OpenGL graphic engine, the base of Roassal3D.• Woden 2: a new 3D graphic engine for the next generation 3D frameworks (Metal3D,Vulcan3D), it is the base of the next generation of Roassal3D.– Talk at ESUG 2016: http://goo.gl/RuW36E• The lowcode subsystem has been realisedhttp://goo.gl/jHjndl• Improvement of FFI (Foreign Function Interface). Work on UFFI to use Lowcode.• The Opal Compiler has been further improved. It has been extended with support forSlots / Layouts and is used as the basis for Lowcode.4 Overview of the ActivitiesThe activities of the PLOMO2 members were mainly oriented towards scientific publications aswell as software development.4.1 Organization• The IWST Workshop series at ESUG in 2014, 2015, 2016 (http://esug.org).• Coding sprints coordinated at the same time both in Lille and Santiago over the wholeperiod.4.2 Research VisitsPLOMO enables the participants RMoD (INRIA Lille Nord Europe) and Pleiad (DCC Univer-sity of Chile) to collaborate by funding their trips.2014• Ronie Saldago: 24/08/2014 until 07/09/2014 to Lille.Subject was FFI and OSWindow.• Miguel Campusano: 16/08/2014 until 11/09/2014 to Lille.Subject was Slots and visual representation of code.• Alexandre Bergel: 13/12/2014 until 01/01/2015 to Lille.Subject: system support for advanced profiling.• Juraj Kubelka: 06/12/2014 until 19/12/2014 to Lille.First visit to RMoD to plan future collaboration.52015• Johan Fabry: January 2015 to Lille for Pharo Days Lille, PLEIAD funded.• Alexandre Bergel: 01/07/2015 until 27/07/2015 to Lille.• Johan Fabry: July 2015 to Lille for ESUG, PLEIAD fundet.• Pierre Chanson: July 2015 and September 2015 to Lille (to discuss PhD with RMoD)• Miguel Campusano: 20/09/2015-07/10/2015, to Lille.• Alexandre Bergel: Dec 2015, to Lille .• Marcus Denker: 2/1/2015 until 20/1/2015, to Santiago, sponsored by PLEIAD.Subject is Slots.• Marcus Denker: Nov 2015 payed by PLEIAD, to Santiago.Subject was Reflection Framework.2016• Ronie Saldago: April - September 2016, to Lille.Working on a new FFI library and a 3D visualization engine• Alexandre Bergel: December 2016, to Lille.Working on a new platform for software and data visualization• Johan Fabry: July 2016, to Lille.Subject was the writing of the book on Spec.• Marcus Denker: December 2016, to Santiago.Working on Reflective foundations. Flight payed by PLEAID.4.3 PLOMO Associated publications[1] Johan Fabry, Andy Kellens, Simon Denier, Stephane Ducasse. “AspectMaps: ExtendingMoose to Visualize AOP Software”. Science of Computer Programming, volume 79, num-ber 1, pp.6-22, January 2014, Elsevierhttps://hal.inria.fr/hal-01086997[2] Johan Fabry, Romain Robbes, Marcus Denker. “DIE: A Domain Specific Aspect Languagefor IDE Events”. Journal of Universal Computer Science, volume 20, number 2, pp.135-168, February 2014https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00936376[3] Esteban Allende, Oscar Callau, Johan Fabry, Éric Tanter, Marcus Denker. “GradualTyping for Smalltalk”. Science of Computer Programming, volume 96, number 1, pp.52-69, December 2014, Elsevierhttps://hal.inria.fr/hal-00862815[4] Benjamin Van Ryseghem, Stephane Ducasse, Johan Fabry. “Seamless Composition andReuse of Customizable User Interfaces with Spec”. Science of Computer Programming,volume 96, number 1, pp.34-51, December 2014, Elsevierhttps://hal.inria.fr/hal-009153506[5] Alexandre Bergel, Sergio Maass, Stephane Ducasse, Tudor Girba. “A Domain-SpecificLanguage For Visualizing Software Dependencies as a Graph”. Proceedings of 2nd IEEEWorking Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT NIER)https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01369700[6] Popular Article LinuxMag: Roassal and the Charter charting framwork.http://www.gnulinuxmag.com[7] Miguel Campusano and Johan Fabry. “From Robots to Humans: Visualizations for RobotSensor Data.” In the third IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VIS-SOFT 2015), Sep 27-28, 2015 , IEEE press.http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/VISSOFT.2015.7332424[8] Damien Cassou, Stephane Ducasse, Luc Fabresse, Johan Fabry, Sven Van Caekenberghe:Enterprise Pharo. This is the third volume of a series of books covering Pharo and itscommunity.http://files.pharo.org/books/enterprise-pharo/[9] Book: Alexandre Bergel, Agile Visualization:http://agilevisualization.com[10] Miguel Campusano and Johan Fabry: “Live Robot Programming: The Language, itsImplementation, and Robot API Independence”. Science of Computer Programming,Elsevier. Received 8 September 2015, Revised 28 March 2016, Accepted 9 June 2016,Available online 17 June 2016.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2016.06.002[11] Leonardo Humberto Silva, Marco Tulio Valente, Nicolas Anquetil, Daniel Carlos Hov-adick Flix, Alexandre Bergel, Anne Etien. “JSClassFinder: A Tool to Detect Class-likeStructures in JavaScript”. Proceedings of Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory andPractice (CBSOFT’15)https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01369705[12] Juan Pablo Sandoval Alcocer, Marcus Denker, Alexandre Bergel, Yasett Acurana. “Dy-namically Composing Collection Operations through Collection Promises’. In: Proceed-ings of IWST16.https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01358347[13] Ronie Salgado, Stephane Ducasse “Lowcode: Extending Pharo with C Types to ImprovePerformance”. In: Proceedings of IWST16.https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01353884[14] Johan Fabry and Stephen Sinclair: ”Interactive Visualizations for Testing Physics Enginesin Robotics”. Proceedings of 4th IEEE working Conference on Software Visualization(Tool paper) 3-4 Oct 2016. IEEE Computer Society PressIn preparation:[15] Leonardo Humberto Silva, Marco Tulio Valente, Alexandre Bergel, Nicolas Anquetil, andAnne Etien “Identifying Classes in Legacy JavaScript Source Code’ In submission to JSS[16] Book in preparation about Spec.https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/view/Books/job/BuildingUIWithSpec/75 Future of the partnershipResearch can not only be done remotely. Close proximity is the very important, it allowsdiscussions and the gestation of new research ideas and projects.The work on both Moose, Pharo and many of the technologies worked on during PLOMO2will continue. Not being able to prolongate the Associated Team will make it harder to financevisits, but we will try to find new sources of funding.8

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