SHF: Small: Modular Reflection

随着互联网和移动设备日益成为我们社会的重要组成部分，对网络和移动应用程序的需求也在增长。软件框架的最新进展极大地减少了开发此类应用程序所需的代码量。从编程语言的角度来看，关键的使能技术是反射，即程序自我反省和自我修改的能力。不幸的是，反射带来了沉重的代价：它会延迟错误的检测，降低错误查找工具的有效性，并降低应用程序的速度。这个研究项目的目标是保留反射的优点，同时消除缺点，从而提高Web和移动应用程序的可靠性和速度。支持这项研究的关键观察是，在软件框架中使用反射是由隐含的约定管理的。如果这些约定可以明确，那么自动化软件工具将能够有效地对有缺陷的代码进行推理。这项研究将创建一种丰富的规范语言来明确这些约定，它将研究从现有应用程序代码推断规范的算法，并将开发工具来检查Web移动应用程序和框架相对于规范的一致性。

As the internet and mobile devices become increasingly importantparts of our society, the need for web and mobile applications hasgrown. Recent advances in software frameworks have drasticallyreduced the amount of code needed to develop such applications. From aprogramming languages perspective, the key enabling technology isreflection, that is, the ability of a program to introspect and tomodify itself. Unfortunately, reflection comes at a heavy cost:it can delay the detection of bugs, it reduces the effectiveness ofbug-finding tools, and it reduces the speed of applications. Thegoal of this research project is to preserve the benefits ofreflection while eliminating the disadvantages, thereby improving thereliability and speed of web and mobile applications.The key observation that underlies this research is that uses ofreflection in software frameworks are governed by implicitconventions. If those conventions could be made explicit, thenautomated software tools will be able to effectively reason aboutreflective code. This research will create a rich specificationlanguage for making those conventions explicit, it will investigatealgorithms for inferring specifications from existing application code, and it will develop tools for checking theconformance of web-mobile applications and frameworks with respect to specifications.