Event Modules - Modularizing Domain-Specific Crosscutting RV Concerns

Runtime verification (RV) facilitates detecting the failures of software during its execution. Due to the complexity of RV techniques, there is an increasing interest in achieving abstractness, modularity, and compose-ability in their implementations by means of dedicated linguistic mechanisms. This paper defines a design space to evaluate the existing domain-specific languages for implementing RV techniques, and identifies the shortcomings of a representative set of these languages with respect to the design space. This paper advocates the need for a language composition framework, which offers the necessary mechanisms to achieve abstractness, modularity, and compose-ability in the implementation of domain-specific crosscutting concerns such as the concerns of RV techniques. We explain event modules as novel linguistic abstractions for modular implementation of domain-specific crosscutting concerns. This paper discusses the implementation of event modules in the EventReactor language, and illustrates the suitability of event modules to implement RV techniques by means of two complementary examples.