D. Leroy, P. Jeanjean, E. Bousse, M. Wimmer, B. Combemale: Runtime Monitoring for Executable DSLs, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 19, no. 2, July 2020, pages 6:1-23 Doi: 10.5381/jot.2020.19.2.a6.
Runtime monitoring is a fundamental technique used throughout the lifecycle of a system for many purposes, such as debugging, testing, or live analytics. While runtime monitoring for general purpose programming languages has seen a great amount of research, developing such complex facilities for any executable Domain Specific Language (DSL) remains a challenging, reoccurring and error prone task. A generic solution must both support a wide range of executable DSLs (xDSLs) and induce as little execution time overhead as possible. Our contribution is a fully generic approach based on a temporal property language with a semantics tailored for runtime verification. Properties can be compiled to efficient runtime monitors that can be attached to any kind of executable discrete event model within an integrated development environment. Efficiency is bolstered using a novel combination of structural model queries and complex event processing. Our evaluation on 3 xDSLs shows that the approach is applicable with an execution time overhead of 121% (on executions shorter than 1s), to 79% (on executions shorter than 20s) making it suitable for model testing and debugging.