Work

Literate Tracing

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: As computer systems grow ever larger and more complex, a crucial task in software development is for one person (the system expert) to communicate to another (the system novice) how a certain program works. This paper reports on the author’s experiences with a paradigm for program documentation that we call literate tracing. A literate trace explains a software system using annotated, concrete execution traces of the system. Literate traces complement both in-code comments (which often lack global context) and out-of-band design docs (which often lack a concrete connection to the code). We also describe TReX, our tool for making literate traces that are interactive, visual, and guaranteed by construction to be faithful to the program semantics. We have used TReX to write literate traces explaining components of large systems software including the Linux kernel, Git source control system, and GCC compiler.

Source: ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!)

DOI: 10.1145/3759429.3762626

Author: Matthew Sotoudeh

Institution: Stanford University

Language: English

Topic: Software Engineering Research

Subfield: Information Systems

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Science Foundation, Brown Institute for Media Innovation

Awards: G2911450482, Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)