Abstract
Run-time monitoring of JavaScript applications is typically achieved either by instrumenting a browser’s virtual machine, usually degrading performance to the level of a simple interpreter, or through complex ad hoc source-to-source transformations. This paper reports on an experiment in layering a portable JS VM on the host VM to expose implementation-level operations that can then be redefined at run-time to monitor an application execution. Our prototype, Photon, exposes object operations and function calls through a meta-object protocol. In order to limit the performance overhead, a dynamic translation of the client program selectively modifies source elements and run-time feedback optimizes monitoring operations. Photon introduces a 4.7× to 191× slowdown when executing benchmarks on popular web browsers. Compared to the Firefox interpreter, it is between 5.5× slower and 7× faster, showing the layering approach is competitive with the instrumentation of a browser VM while being faster and simpler than other source-to-source transformations.
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Lavoie, E., Dufour, B., Feeley, M. (2014). Portable and Efficient Run-time Monitoring of JavaScript Applications Using Virtual Machine Layering. In: Jones, R. (eds) ECOOP 2014 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8586. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_22
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