Chamelon : A Delta-Debugger for OCaml

Abstract

Tools that manipulate OCaml code can sometimes fail even on correct programs. Identifying and understanding the cause of the error usually involves manually reducing the size of the program, so as to obtain a shorter program causing the same error—a long, sometimes complex and rarely interesting task. Our work consists in automating this task using a minimiser, or delta-debugger. To do so, we propose a list of unitary heuristics, i.e. small-scale reductions, applied through a dichotomy-based state-of-the-art algorithm. These proposals are implemented in the free Chamelon tool. Although designed to assist the development of an OCaml compiler, Chamelon can be adapted to all kinds of projects that manipulate OCaml code. It can analyse multifile projects and efficiently minimise real-world programs, reducing their size by one to several orders of magnitude. It is currently used to assist the industrial development of the flambda2 optimising compiler.