DIABLO: a reliable, retargetable and extensible link-time rewriting framework

Modern software engineering techniques introduce an overhead to programs in terms of performance and code size. A traditional development environment, where only the compiler optimizes the code, cannot completely eliminate this overhead. To effectively remove the overhead, tools are needed that have a whole-program overview. Link-time binary rewriting is an effective technique for whole-program optimization and instrumentation. In this paper, we describe a novel framework to reliably perform link-time program transformations. This framework is designed to be retargetable, supporting multiple architectures and development toolchains. Furthermore it is extensible, which we illustrate by describing three different applications that are built on top of the framework.