Flexible and Efficient Measurement of Dynamic Bytecode Metrics

Code instrumentation is finding more and more practical applications, but the required program transformations are often difficult to implement, due to the lack of dedicated, high-level tools. In this paper we present a novel instrumentation framework that supports the partial evaluation of compiled Java code transformation templates, with the goal of efficiently measuring chosen dynamic bytecode and control flow metrics. This framework, as well as the instrumentation code it generates, is implemented in pure Java and hence completely platform-independent. We show the benefits of our approach in several application areas, such as platform-independent resource management and profiling of software components.