Perf4JS: Automatically Fixing Performance Problems in Real-World JavaScript Applications

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Pradel
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 383433544

• Final Report Year: 2022

Final Report Abstract

In summary, the Perf4JS project has been very successful. The project has enabled significant scientific contributions that advance the state of the art in program analysis, especially in the web and with a focus on software performance. Beyond the original goals, the project has served as seed funding for a direction not anticipated when writing the proposal, namely the analysis of WebAssembly software. WebAssembly is becoming increasingly prevalent in practice and complements JavaScript with a language for the web that focuses on performance. Studying and analyzing WebAssembly software is an important contribution to the original goal of improving the performance of web applications.

Publications

• (2018, February). Synthesizing programs that expose performance bottlenecks. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (pp. 314-326)
  Luca Della Toffola, Michael Pradel, Thomas R. Gross
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1145/3179541.3168830)
• (2018, October). Feedback-directed differential testing of interactive debuggers. In Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (pp. 610-620)
  Daniel Lehmann, Michael Pradel
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3236037)
• (2019, April). Wasabi: A framework for dynamically analyzing webassembly. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (pp. 1045-1058)
  Daniel Lehmann, Michael Pradel
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1145/3297858.3304068)
• (2019, July). Interactive metamorphic testing of debuggers. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (pp. 273-283)
  Sandro Tolksdorf, Daniel Lehmann, Michael Pradel
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1145/3293882.3330567)
• (2021, April). An empirical study of real-world webassembly binaries: Security, languages, use cases. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (pp. 2696-2708)
  Aaron Hilbig, Daniel Lehmann, Michael Pradel
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3450138)
• (2021, April). Confprof: White-box performance profiling of configuration options. In Proceedings of the ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (pp. 1-8)
  Xue Han, Tingting Yu, Michael Pradel
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1145/3427921.3450255)
• Satisfying Increasing Performance Requirements With Caching at the Application Level. In: IEEE Softw. 38 (3), S. 87–95
  Jhonny Mertz, Ingrid Nunes, Luca Della Toffola, Marija Selakovic, Michael Pradel
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1109/ms.2020.3033508)
• (2022). Nessie: Automatically Testing JavaScript APIs with Asynchronous Callbacks. ICSE
  Ellen Arteca, Sebastian Harner, Michael Pradel, Frank Tip