Virtualization Support for Dynamic Core Library Update

Guillermo Polito (1, 2) , Stéphane Ducasse (1) , Noury Bouraqadi (2) , Luc Fabresse (2) , Max Mattone (2, 1)

1 RMOD - Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution
2 CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe - Centre for Digital Systems

Dynamically updating language runtime and core libraries such as collections and threading is challenging since the update mechanism uses such libraries at the same time that it modifies them. To tackle this challenge, we present Dynamic Core Library Update (DCU) as an extension of Dynamic Software Update (DSU) and our approach based on a virtualization architecture. Our solution supports the update of core libraries as any other normal library, avoiding the circular dependencies between the updater and the core libraries. Our benchmarks show that there is no evident performance overhead in comparison with a default execution. Finally, we show that our approach can be applied to real life scenario by introducing a critical update inside a web application with 20 simulated concurrent users. Acknowledgments We thank the European Smalltalk User Group for their support (www.esug.org).

Mots clés: Self-Modification; Pharo; Hot Updates; OOP

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Guillermo Polito, Stéphane Ducasse, Noury Bouraqadi, Luc Fabresse, Max Mattone. Virtualization Support for Dynamic Core Library Update. Onward!, Oct 2015, Pittsburg, United States. ⟨10.1145/2814228.2814236⟩. ⟨hal-01185819⟩