arXiv subjects

Anthony Savidis

Publications and source records attributed to Anthony Savidis.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Code Arcades: 3d Visualization of Classes, Dependencies and Software Metrics

Software visualization seeks to represent software artifacts graphical-ly in two or three dimensions, with the goal of enhancing comprehension, anal-ysis, maintenance, and evolution of the source code. In this context, visualiza-tions employ graphical forms such as dependency structures, treemaps, or time-lines that incorporate repository histories. These visualizations allow software engineers to identify structural patterns, detect complexity hotspots, and infer system behaviors that are difficult to perceive directly from source text. By adopting metaphor-based approaches, visualization tools provide macroscopic overviews while enabling focused inspection of specific program elements, thus offering an accessible means of understanding large-scale systems. The contri-bution of our work lies in three areas. First, we introduce a configurable group-ing mechanism that supports flexible organization of code elements based on arbitrary relationships. Second, we combine fine-grained and coarse-grained software metrics to provide a multi-level perspective on system properties. Third, we present an interactive visualization engine that allows developers to dynamically adjust rendering attributes. Collectively, these advances provide a more adaptable and insightful approach to source code comprehension.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Implementation of Live Reverse Debugging in LLDB

Debugging is an essential process with a large share of the development effort, being a relentless quest for offensive code through tracing, inspection and iterative running sessions. Probably every developer has been in a situation with a clear wish to rewind time just for a while, only to retry some actions alternatively, instead of restarting the entire session. Well, the genie to fulfill such a wish is known as a reverse debugger. Their inherent technical complexity makes them very hard to implement, while the imposed execution overhead turns them to less preferable for adoption. There are only a few available, most being off-line tools, working on recorded, previously run, sessions. We consider live reverse debuggers both challenging and promising, since they can fit into existing forward debuggers, and we developed the first live reverse debugger on top of LLDB, discussing in detail our implementation approach.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Translating declarative control elements to imperative using 'l-value redefinition graphs'

We focus on control constructs that allow programmers define actions to be performed when respective conditions are met without requiring the explicit evaluation and testing of conditions as part of an imperative algorithm. Such elements are commonly referred as declarative, not theoretically related to declarative languages. We introduce declarative constructs in the C++ language, presenting the translation method to standard C++. The innovative feature of our method is the accommodation of l-values involving arbitrary pointer / array expressions and objects, supporting immediate runtime evaluation upon content update even if such l-values bind to variant storage locations at runtime. To accomplish this we define 'l-value redefinition graphs', capturing storage binding dependencies among variables, being the floor-plan of our code generation and runtime management approach.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2018

There is more to PCG than Meets the Eye: NPC AI, Dynamic Camera, PVS and Lightmaps

Procedural content generation (PCG) concerns all sorts of algorithms and tools which automatically produce game content, without requiring manual authoring by game artists. Besides generating com-plex static meshes, the PCG core usually encompasses geometrical information about the game world that can be useful in supporting other critical subsystems of the game engine. We discuss our experi-ence from the development of the iOS game title named "Fallen God: Escape Underworld", and show how our PCG produced extra metadata regarding the game world, in particular: (i) an annotated dun-geon graph to support path finding for NPC AI to attack or avoid the player (working for bipeds, birds, insects and serpents); (ii) a quantized voxel space to allow discrete A* for the dynamic camera system to work in the continuous 3d space; (iii) dungeon portals to support a dynamic PVS; and (iv) procedural ambient occlusion and tessellation of a separate set of simplified meshes to support very-fast and high-quality light mapping.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2018

Multi-Stage JavaScript

Multi-stage languages support generative metaprogramming via macros evaluated in a process preceding the actual interpretation or compilation of the program in which they are used. Macros update the source of their hosting program by emitting code that takes their place in the file, while their code may also be produced, fully or partially, by nested macros. All macros at the same nesting belong to the same stage, with the outer stage collecting the macros affect-ing only the main program. We extended JavaScript with staging annotations and implemented them in Spider Monkey, emitting pure JavaScript code as the final outcome of stage computation. We discuss how the original Spider Monkey system is minimally affected with extensions in the syntax, parser and internal AST structures, and the addition of an unparser, a staging loop, some library functions and a debugger backend component for AST inspection. Since stages have a generative metaprogramming role we do not foresee any interplay with the browser DOM, and thus there is no reason to repeat their evalua-tion on every page load. Hence, such JavaScript extensions are meant only for development-time, emitting pure JavaScript code that can be run in any browser. Finally, to enable debugging stages in any browser we implemented a pure JavaScript client, communicating with the extended Spider Monkey, and offering the necessary AST display and unparsing that a browser debugger does not provide.

cs.PL↗