License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany license (CC BY 3.0 DE)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/DARTS.5.2.4
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-107815
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2019/10781/
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Singh, Robbert Gurdeep ; Lopez, Carmen Torres ; Marr, Stefan ; Boix, Elisa Gonzalez ; Scholliers, Christophe

Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs (Artifact)

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DARTS-5-2-4.pdf (0.3 MB)

Abstract

Many of today's software systems are parallel or concurrent. With the rise of Node.js and more generally event-loop architectures, many systems need to handle concurrency. However, their non-deterministic behavior makes it hard to debug. Today's interactive debuggers unfortunately do not support developers in debugging non-deterministic issues. They only allow exploring a single execution path. Therefore, some bugs may never be reproduced in the debugging session, because the conditions to trigger are not reached. As a solution, we propose multiverse debugging, a new approach for debugging non-deterministic programs that allow developers to observe all possible execution paths of a parallel program and debug it interactively. We introduce the concepts of multiverse breakpoints and stepping, which can halt a program in different execution paths, i.e. universes. We apply multiverse debugging to AmbientTalk, an actor-based language, resulting in Voyager, a proof of concept multiverse debugger that takes as input Featherweight AmbientTalk programs written in PLT-Redex, and allows programmers to interactively browse all possible execution states by means of multiverse breakpoints and stepping commands. We provide a proof of non-interference, i.e we prove that observing the behavior of a program by the debugger does not affect the behavior of that program and vice versa. Multiverse debugging establishes the foundation for debugging non-deterministic programs interactively, which we believe can aid the development of parallel and concurrent systems.

BibTeX - Entry

@Article{singh_et_al:DARTS:2019:10781,
  author =	{Robbert Gurdeep Singh and Carmen Torres Lopez and Stefan Marr and Elisa Gonzalez Boix and Christophe Scholliers},
  title =	{{Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs (Artifact)}},
  pages =	{4:1--4:3},
  journal =	{Dagstuhl Artifacts Series},
  ISSN =	{2509-8195},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{5},
  number =	{2},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10781},
  doi =		{10.4230/DARTS.5.2.4},
  annote =	{Keywords: Debugging, Concurrency, Actors, Formal Semantics}
}

Keywords: Debugging, Concurrency, Actors, Formal Semantics
Collection: Special Issue of the 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019)
Related Scholarly Article: https://dx.doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.27
Issue Date: 2019
Date of publication: 12.07.2019

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