CAPSTONE_INTRODUCTION.MD

Capstone Introduction

GraalVM - terminology (simplified)

• Graal - An advanced optimizing just-in-time (JIT) compiler for Java
• GraalVM - A JVM distribution with GraalVM as the (tier 2) JIT compiler
• Native Image - An ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler for Java.
  • Documentation
  • Related paper.
• Graal IR - An intermediate representation used in Graal. It is graph based and in SSA form.
  • More details can be found here.
• Truffle - A framework for the implementation of programming language runtimes as AST interpreters.
  • AST interpreters are generally very slow compared to bytecode interpreters, JIT compilers or AOT compilers, but Truffle uses partial evaluation (futamura projections) to JIT-compile the ASTs of hot functions.
  • Documentation
  • Related paper

Useful links

• Graal-prophet git repository
  • https://github.com/cloudhubs/graal
  • branch prophet-plugin-master
    • should be the default
• Developing native image
• mx
  • The build tool used to build GraalVM projects.
• Ideal Graph Visualizer (IGV)
  • Used to visualize Graal IR graphs.
  • More info

Initial tasks

Shared

• Setup a working environment
  • clone mx
  • add it to PATH
  • clone graal-prophet https://github.com/cloudhubs/graal
  • open the project in an IDE using mx intelijinit
  • build native image of helloworld
  • view the graph of the main method in IGV
  • build native image of helloworld using mx helloworld or write your own program
• Look at the source code of the prophet plugin
• Look at the source code of prophet-utils

Divide & Conquer

• Design a more general approach for the annotation extraction.
  • Try to think of an approach that would generalize to other Spring Entities (and then, as the next step, to other java frameworks) without too much extra code.
  • Do not depend on concrete annotations in the code.
• Bounded context comparison
  • Write a program to compare two bounded contexts and report differences.
• Prophet-utils - graal-prophet interface
  • Design a proper (and ideally simple) interface between the prophet plugin in graal and the rest of the system
• Refactoring, cleanup bug fixes
  • Everything is Work in Progress, so you might encounter some silly code.
• Testing
  • Tests
  • continuous integration