Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Debugging support for highly optimized execution environments is notoriously difficult to implement. The Truffle/Graal platform for implementing dynamic languages offers an opportunity to resolve the apparent trade-off between debugging and high performance. Truffle/Graal-implemented languages are expressed as abstract syntax tree (AST) interpreters. They enjoy competitive performance through platform support for type specialization, partial evaluation, and dynamic optimization/deoptimization. A prototype debugger for Ruby, implemented on this platform, demonstrates that basic debugging services can be implemented with modest effort and without significant impact on program performance. Prototyped functionality includes breakpoints, both simple and conditional, at lines and at local variable assignments. The debugger interacts with running programs by inserting additional nodes at strategic AST locations; these are semantically transparent by default, but when activated can observe and interrupt execution. By becoming in effect part of the executing program, these \"wrapper\" nodes are subject to full runtime optimization, and they incur zero runtime overhead when debugging actions are not activated. Conditions carry no overhead beyond evaluation of the expression, which is optimized in the same way as user code, greatly improving the prospects for capturing rarely manifested bugs. When a breakpoint interrupts program execution, the platform automatically restores the full execution state of the program (expressed as Java data structures), as if running in the unoptimized AST interpreter. This then allows full introspection of the execution data structures such as the AST and method activation frames when in the interactive debugger console. Our initial evaluation indicates that such support could be permanently enabled in production environments. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2014 | 10.1145/2617548.2617550 | Dyla@PLDI |
Field | DocType | Citations |
Interrupt,Data structure,Virtual machine,Debugger,Partial evaluation,Computer science,Abstract syntax tree,Operating system,Algorithmic program debugging,Debugging | Conference | 16 |
PageRank | References | Authors |
0.68 | 15 | 3 |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Seaton | 1 | 94 | 5.68 |
| Michael L. Van De Vanter | 2 | 187 | 18.58 |
| Michael Haupt | 3 | 18 | 1.08 |