DETERMINING DYNAMIC PROPERTIES OF PROGRAMS

Techniques for obtaining information about dynamic properties of a first program. The techniques involve making a static analysis of the first program to determine what instrumentation is needed to produce the desired information and then producing a second program which causes a programmable instrumentation apparatus to produce an instrumented version of the first program. The programmable instrumentation apparatus may be a programmable binary editor or a a debugger. Execution of the instrumented program provides the information about the dynamic properties. The program for the instrumentation apparatus is produced by a source code analyzer which statically analyzes the source code. The source code analyzer is in turn produced by a code analyzer generator. Output from the instrumentation may be provided to a graphical display system. In one use of the techniques, the code analyzer generator not only generates a source code analyzer for producing the second program, but also a source code analyzer for producing a program which when executed by a graphical browser makes a flow graph for the program. In this case, the graphical browser responds to the output from the execution environment by altering the appearance of the flow graph.