Anne-Françoise Le Meur

A tour of tempo: a program specializer for the C language

Specialization is an automatic approach to customizing a program with respect to configuration values. In this paper, we present a survey of Tempo, a specializer for the C language. Tempo offers specialization at both compile time and run time, and both program and data specialization. To control the specialization process, Tempo provides the program developer with a declarative language to describe specialization opportunities for a given program. n nThe functionalities and features of Tempo have been driven by the needs of practical applications. Tempo has been successfully applied to a variety of realistic programs in areas such as operating systems and networking. We give an overview of the design of Tempo and of its use in specializing realistic applications.

On Designing a Target-Independent DSL for Safe OS Process-Scheduling Components

Developing new process-scheduling components for multiple OSes is challenging because of the tight interdependence between an OS and its scheduler and because of the stringent safety requirements that OS code must satisfy. In this context, a domain-specific language (DSL), designed by a scheduling expert, can encapsulate scheduling expertise and thus facilitate scheduler programming and verification. Nevertheless, designing a DSL that is target-independent and provides safety guarantees requires expertise not only in scheduling but also in the structure of various OSes. To address these issues, we propose the introduction of an OS expert into the DSL design process and the use of a type system to enable the OS expert to express relevant OS properties.