DDL: Extending Dynamic Linking for Program Customization, Analysis, and Evolution Sumant Tambe Navin Vedagiri Naoman Abbas Jonathan E. Cook Department of Computer Science New Mexico State University Las Cruces, NM 88003 USA
[email protected] Abstract methods, global data) to the runtime of the program. While new software languages and environments An extra module, the dynamic linker, is loaded with have moved towards richer introspective and manip- the program, and accomplishes the dynamic link- ulatable runtime environments, there is still much ing necessary for the program to complete its execu- traditional software that is compiled into platform- tion. Since symbols are not yet bound, a dynamic specific executables and runs in a context that does linker could allow a tool builder access to the bind- not easily offer such luxuries. Yet even in these ing operation, and allow the tool to take a variety environments, mechanisms such as dynamic link li- of actions. Inserting wrappers for tracing, security, braries do offer the potential of building more con- assertion checks, and many other uses ought to be trol over the deployed and running system, and can possible. Redirecting a binding to another symbol offer opportunities for supporting dynamic evolu- should be supported. Even run-time modification tion of such systems. Indeed, the basic dynamic of bindings should be possible. All of this is feasible linking mechanisms can be exploited to offer a rich without any modification or translation of the object component-based execution environment. code of the application. In this paper, we present our initial explorations Current dynamic linkers do allow rudimentary into building such support.