METHOD, APPARATUS, AND PRODUCT FOR DYNAMIC SOFTWARE CODE TRANSLATION SYSTEM

A method and apparatus for improving the process of software development by a dynamic software development tool. The present invention efficiently executes in a user process and provides software developers with a high performance tool for software optimization. The present invention may augment the user process code instructions at runtime and, for every series of machine instructions that the original user source code would have executed, a series of instructions may be executed that are semantically equivalent to the user process code instructions and are altered to optimize the user process code instructions. The present invention may use emulation or translation to alter the user process code instructions. The resulting process is executed in the user process space and advantageously maintains the original flow of instruction execution. The present invention employs a technique of dynamically translating code at runtime and may operate on a virtual machine or a hardware machine. Further, the present invention may operate on various types of code segments and is not, for instance, limited to manipulating only code modules and may operate on a basic code block. Therefore, the present invention enables efficient optimized user process code instruction debugging, instrumentation, and simulation by preserving the original flow of user process code instructions while enabling emulation and translation on the original user process code instructions.