Paper Info
Title
Multiverse Debugging - Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs (Brave New Idea Paper).
Abstract
Many of todayu0027s 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. Todayu0027s 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.27
ECOOP
Field
DocType
Volume
Operational semantics,AmbientTalk,Programming language,Debugger,Concurrency,Computer science,Software system,Multiverse,Debugging,Voyager program
Conference
134
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Carmen Torres Lopez192.55
Robbert Gurdeep Singh200.34
Stefan Marr312421.54
Elisa Gonzalez Boix419525.83
Christophe Scholliers512213.38