This paper presents a proposal (story) of how statically detecting
unreachable objects (in Java) could be used to improve a particular runtime
verification approach (for Java), namely parametric trace slicing. Monitoring
algorithms for parametric trace slicing depend on garbage collection to (i)
cleanup data-structures storing monitored objects, ensuring they do not become
unmanageably large, and (ii) anticipate the violation of (non-safety)
properties that cannot be satisfied as a monitored object can no longer appear
later in the trace. The proposal is that both usages can be improved by making
the unreachability of monitored objects explicit in the parametric property and
statically introducing additional instrumentation points generating related
events. The ideas presented in this paper are still exploratory and the
intention is to integrate the described techniques into the MarQ monitoring
tool for quantified event automata.Comment: In Proceedings PrePost 2017, arXiv:1708.0688
