License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.27
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-108192
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2019/10819/
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Torres Lopez, Carmen ; Gurdeep Singh, Robbert ; Marr, Stefan ; Gonzalez Boix, Elisa ; Scholliers, Christophe

Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs (Brave New Idea Paper)

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LIPIcs-ECOOP-2019-27.pdf (2 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, its non-deterministic behavior makes it hard to reproduce bugs. Today's interactive debuggers unfortunately do not support developers in debugging non-deterministic issues. They only allow us to explore a single execution path. Therefore, some bugs may never be reproduced in the debugging session, because the right conditions are not triggered.
As a solution, we propose multiverse debugging, a new approach for debugging non-deterministic programs that allows 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 multiverse debugger implemented on top of the AmbientTalk operational semantics. 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

@InProceedings{torreslopez_et_al:LIPIcs:2019:10819,
  author =	{Carmen Torres Lopez and Robbert Gurdeep Singh and Stefan Marr and Elisa Gonzalez Boix and Christophe Scholliers},
  title =	{{Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs (Brave New Idea Paper)}},
  booktitle =	{33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019)},
  pages =	{27:1--27:30},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-111-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{134},
  editor =	{Alastair F. Donaldson},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10819},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-108192},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.27},
  annote =	{Keywords: Debugging, Parallelism, Concurrency, Actors, Formal Semantics}
}

Keywords: Debugging, Parallelism, Concurrency, Actors, Formal Semantics
Collection: 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019)
Issue Date: 2019
Date of publication: 10.07.2019
Supplementary Material: ECOOP 2019 Artifact Evaluation approved artifact available at https://dx.doi.org/10.4230/DARTS.5.2.4

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