Progvis
Progvis is a program visualization tool primarily aimed at concurrent programs. Since a key aspect of understanding the behavior of concurrent programs is to understand what data is shared, Progvis provides a detailed visualization of memory, including pointers and references. As such, Progvis is also useful to visualize for example pointer arithmetics in sequential programs as well.
Even though Progvis is able to detect and report concurrency issues that have happened in the visualization, it is difficult to make sure that a program is free from concurrency issue. Doing so would require trying all possible interleavings of the threads spawned by the program, which quickly gets tedious. To aid further, Progvis provides a model checker that is able to automatically find any concurrency errors in small programs. If it finds one, it illustrates the issue by providing an example interleaving.
While Progvis is designed to visualize programs written in the C language, it is mostly language agnostic thanks to Storm. Progvis delegates parsing and compilation to Storm, and instruments the resulting intermediate representation. This way, Progvis supports all languages supported by Storm out of the box. However, the quality of visualizations differ greatly as Progvis does not necessarily know of language-specific constructs that benefit from a customized visualization.
Starting Progvis
To run Progvis, first download Storm, extract the archive, and finally click the
Progvis file (either Progvis.bat or Progvis.sh depending on your system). The main window of
Progvis will appear shortly thereafter. You can also start Progvis from the interactive Storm prompt
by typin progvis:main, or from the command line by typing storm -f progvis.main.
If you are running Ubuntu or Debian, you can install storm through your package manager (sudo apt install progvis).
This will create a launcher in your system menu, and provide the command progvis.
Learn concurrent programming
The book Introduction to Concurrent Programming in C provides an in-depth introduction to concurrent programming in C and relies heavily on Progvis for its explanations, examples, and exercises. Furthermore, the first chapters of the book gives an introduction both to Progvis itself and the synchronization primitives provided by Progvis.
Supported languages
As mentioned previously, Progvis technically supports all languages in Storm to some degree. However, since Progvis might need appropriate medatata from the language (for introspection and custom visualizations), support varies a bit in practice. The support is as follows:
-
C is the main driving force behind Progvis, and as such a larger part of the language is
supported (but not much of the standard library). Progvis contains its own implementation of C/C++
in
progvis.lang.cpp. A large part of the language is implemented and works as intended. The implementation is geared towards being used in Progvis, however, and as such pointer safety is prioritized above execution speed. As such, the implementation inserts array bounds checks among other things to avoid unnecessary crashes, and use after free errors. Type casting is also limited to some extent to avoid corrupting memory and crashing the system. The implementation provides a set of synchronization primitives that can be used from C that are available in the packageprogvis.lang.cpp.runtime. The directoryroot/progvis_democontains a number of examples that show how they are used. -
C++is also supported to some extent. The C/C++ frontend implements enough of the language to show how central parts of the language behave. For example, pointers, references, classes with copy- and move semantics. Most notably, templates and the standard library are currently missing from the implementation. - Basic Storm works well for mostly sequential programs. Progvis does yet not understand the standard synchronization primitives and will thus not visualize them properly. Furthermore, a suitable visualization is not yet available for all types in the standard library. Some of the types there will appear in either too much or too little detail.