System-Specific Interpreters Make Megasystems Friendlier

TL;DR

This paper presents system-specific interpreters (SSIs) as a novel tool to improve user understanding and control of large, complex megasystems by enabling direct module execution in a debugging environment.

Contribution

It introduces SSIs as a new approach to interact with megasystems, allowing module-level execution without full system setup, along with a prototype framework for creating SSIs.

Findings

SSIs enable direct module execution in megasystems.

The prototype framework facilitates writing SSIs.

SSIs improve user control over complex software systems.

Abstract

Modern operating systems, browsers, and office suites have become megasystems built on millions of lines of code. Their sheer size can intimidate even experienced users and programmers away from attempting to understand and modify the software running on their machines. This paper introduces system-specific interpreters (SSIs) as a tool to help users regain knowledge of and control over megasystems. SSIs directly execute individual modules of a megasystem in a gdb-like environment without forcing the user to build, run, and trace the entire system. A prototype framework to help write SSIs is described in this paper and available for download at https://github.com/matthewsot/ssi-live22.