vitamix is a source-to-source compiler, coupled with a runtime logic, for "virtualizing time" in Go programs. It is intended to aid in the testing of and experimentation with extremely time-sensitive "control" software, which is itself written in Go.

Control software (like robotic control or congestion control) is software that in one form or another listens to external events in real time and reacts with carefully-timed responses.

Control software is notoriously hard to get right, because even the time to compute a response (which depends on the specific implementation and the hardware) can and does affect the overall outcomes in a non-negligible manner.

In developing control software, one wants to be able to perform sandbox simulations, while meeting the following demands:

• The computational time (i.e. the time it takes the software to compute a reaction to an event) is zero. Being able to do this is a way of decoupling the outcomes of the response logic (whose timing is of central importance) from the delays incurred by implementation and hardware peculiarities.

• Execution outcomes are deterministically exactly reproducible, both in value and in timing. When writing tests for control software, the testing framework often needs to check whether responses occur at desired times. This is hard to achieve while using real time since even the outside temperature can affect the execution speed of your code.

• Executions that are long-running in real time complete instantaneously in the sandbox. More often than not, we like to simulate a control algorithm for a long time (e.g. minutes) to verify that its behavior is stable over time. A long-running control program often sleeps most of the time, while waking up at sparse moments to respond to some external event. In a sandbox, we would really like to be able to execute such a long-running program without waiting through the times when the software is sleeping.

Beyond being able to skip over sleeping time and being able to remove the effect of your own code's run time, one can envision additional time-related needs like:

• Simulate different and varying CPU speeds: This applies e.g. if one wants to test whether the control software behaves accurately in extreme situation when it is starved out of CPU resources by other running processes (e.g. a web server experiencing a denial-of-service attack).

In summary, we would like to be able to execute any Go program, while eliminating

vitamix accommodates precisely these needs: vitamix is a tool that allows one to execute

vitamix consists of two parts:

• Source-to-source transformer which rewrites the program source, and
• Go package which is utilized by the rewritten source and acts as an additional runtime (additional to the Go runtime).

To install,

$ go get github.com/petar/vitamix

vitamix is authored and maintained by Petar Maymounkov.