Making events less slippery with eel

Abstract

Event-driven programs divide program control flow into a series of callback functions, making program behav-ior difficult to follow. However, current program analy-sis techniques can preserve the event model while mak-ing it easier to read, write, debug and maintain. We de-signed the Explicit Event Library (libeel) to be amenable to program analysis and created tools to graphically ex-pose control flow, verify resource safety properties, and simplify debugging. The result sustains the advantages of event-driven programming while adding the important advantage of programmability. 1