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A Survey of Practical Software Adaptation Techniques

This paper surveys a broad range of relevant research, describing and contrasting the approaches of each using a uniform termino- logical and conceptual vocabulary, and identifies and discusses three commonly advocated principles within this work.
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Dynamically diagnosing type errors in unsafe code

Existing approaches for detecting type errors in unsafe languages are limited. Static analysis methods are imprecise, and often require source-level changes, while most dynamic methods check only…
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The missing link: explaining ELF static linking, semantically

This paper provides the first validated formalisation of a realistic executable and linkable format (ELF), and captures aspects of the Application Binary Interfaces for four mainstream platforms (AArch64, AMD64, Power64, and IA32).
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An Analysis of x86-64 Inline Assembly in C Programs

The findings are intended to help developers of C-focused tools, those testing compilers, and language designers seeking to reduce the reliance on inline assembly, and they may also aid the design of tools focused oninline assembly itself.
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Virtual machines should be invisible

This work motivates an alternative approach to VM design aiming to be unobtrusive in general, and prioritising two key concerns specifically: foreign function interfacing and support for runtime analysis tools (such as debuggers, profilers etc.).
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Reliable and fast DWARF-based stack unwinding

Two techniques to perform validation and synthesis of the DWARF stack unwinding tables, and their implementation for the x86_64 architecture are described, which have proven effective for compiler and inline assembly testing and can generate DwarF unwind tables for arbitrary binaries lacking debug information.
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Evaluating programming systems design

This paper asks whether there can be more amenable methods of evaluation derived from existing informal practices such as multimedia essays, demos, and interactive tutorials and proposes to hold a panel session at the conference on the topic.
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Exploring C semantics and pointer provenance

This paper aims to reconcile the ISO C standard, mainstream compiler behaviour, and the semantics relied on by the corpus of existing C code, and presents two coherent proposals, tracking provenance via integers and not; both address many design questions.
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Towards a dynamic object model within Unix processes

This work investigates whether it makes sense for Unix's user-level services to subsume those of VMs, and describes the design and implementation of a system, liballocs, which adds these capabilities in a highly compatible way, and its consequences.
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The JVM is not observable enough (and what to do about it)

It is argued that no Java platform mechanism provides simultaneously adequate performance, reliability and expressiveness, but that this weakness is fixable.
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