Towards Meta-Level Engineering and Tooling for Complex Concurrent Systems
Proceedings of the 9th Arbeitstagung Programmiersprachen, volume 1559 of ATPS'16, page 91--95. CEUR-WS, (Feb 25, 2016)Abstract
With the widespread use of multicore processors, software
becomes more and more diverse in its use of parallel computing
resources. To address all application requirements, each with the
appropriate abstraction, developers mix and match various
concurrency abstractions made available to them via libraries and
frameworks. Unfortunately, today's tools such as debuggers and
profilers do not support the diversity of these abstractions.
Instead of enabling developers to reason about the high-level
programming concepts, they used to express their programs, the
tools work only on the library's implementation level. While this
is a common problem also for other libraries and frameworks, the
complexity of concurrency exacerbates the issue further, and
reasoning on the higher levels of the concurrency abstractions is
essential to manage the associated complexity.
In this position paper, we identify open research issues and
propose to build tools based on a common meta-level interface to
enable developers to reasons about their programs based on the
high-level concepts they used to implement them.
