Progvis
This is a program visualization tool aimed at concurrent programs and related issues. The tool itself is mostly language agnostic, and relies on Storm to compile the provided code and provide basic debug information. The generated code is then inspected and instrumented to provide an experience similar to a basic debugger. The tool emphasizes a visual representation of the object hierarchy that is manipulated by the executed program to make it easy to understand how it looks. In particular, a visual representation is beneficial over a text representation since it makes it easier to find shared data that might need to be synchronized in a concurrent program.
As mentioned, the tool is aimed at concurrent programs. Therefore, it allows spawning multiple threads running the same program to see if that affects the program's execution (this is mostly interesting if global variables are used). Furthermore, any spawned threads also appear in the tool, and the user may control them independently to explore possible race conditions or other synchronization errors. If enabled from the menu bar, the tool keeps track of reads and writes to the data structure in order to highlight basic race conditions in addition to deadlocks.
Starting Progvis
To start the tool, download Storm, and click the Progvis file (either
Progvis.bat or Progvis.sh depending on your system). The main window of Progvis should appear
shortly thereafter. You can also start Progvis from the interactive Storm prompt by typing
progvis:main, or from the command line by typing Storm -f progvis.main.
Supported languages
In theory, all languages in Storm are supported by Progvis to some extent. As Progvis is a bit intrusive, however, language support varies slightly:
-
Basic Stormworks 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. -
Cis 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++ inprogvis.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.