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

Authors Robbert Gurdeep Singh, Carmen Torres Lopez, Stefan Marr, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Christophe Scholliers



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DARTS.5.2.4.pdf
  • Filesize: 300 kB
  • 3 pages

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Author Details

Robbert Gurdeep Singh
  • Universiteit Gent, Belgium
Carmen Torres Lopez
  • Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Stefan Marr
  • School of Computing University of Kent, United Kingdom
Elisa Gonzalez Boix
  • Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Christophe Scholliers
  • Universiteit Gent, Belgium

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Thomas Dupriez (ENS Paris-Saclay - RMoD, Inria, Lille-Nord Europe) for an initial implementation of the underlying visualization and reduction code.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Robbert Gurdeep Singh, Carmen Torres Lopez, Stefan Marr, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, and Christophe Scholliers. Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs (Artifact). In Special Issue of the 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019). Dagstuhl Artifacts Series (DARTS), Volume 5, Issue 2, pp. 4:1-4:3, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019)
https://doi.org/10.4230/DARTS.5.2.4

Artifact

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.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Concurrent programming languages
  • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging
Keywords
  • Debugging
  • Concurrency
  • Actors
  • Formal Semantics

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