Improving live debugging of concurrent threads

Leske, Max

doi:10.1145/2984043.2998544

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…From the selected languages we derived a list of debuggers by including the standard debugger for each language (if one exists) and possibly others that are used by a significant number of developers (e.g., debuggers used by popular development environments). The debuggers covered by our survey are: Java Debugger Interface 13 (Java), Visual Studio debugger 14 (C # , C ++ , Visual Basic .NET, JavaScript), PyDev 15 (Python), pdb 16 (Python), perldebug 17 (Perl), GDB 18 (C), Chrome development tools 19 (JavaScript), XDebug 20 (PHP), Zend Debugger 21 (PHP), debug.rb 22 (Ruby), LLDB 23 (Objective-C, Swift), GHCi debugger (Haskell) 24 , Concurrent Haskell debugger [6] (Haskell), SISC debugger 25 (Scheme), Scala asynchronous debugger 26 (Scala), Self debugger 27 (Self), ocamldebug 28 (OCaml), XPCE debugger 29 (Prolog), Pharo debugger. 30…”

Section: Selected Debuggersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We discussed the approach for debugging remote promises in a previous work [20]. We also sketched the approach for debugging local threads in a short two-page paper [19]. The present paper extends our previous work as follows: (i) we present a more detailed thread and debugger model for working with a virtual thread, (ii) we present in detail the use cases for debugging local threads, local promises, remote promises, and a remote object-oriented database, and (iii) we provide an in-depth analysis of existing debugging support for concurrent programs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Improving live debugging of concurrent threads through thread histories

Leske

Chiș²,

Nierstrasz

2018

Science of Computer Programming

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Concurrency issues are inherently harder to identify and fix than issues in sequential programs, due to aspects like indeterminate order of access to shared resources and thread synchronisation. Live debuggers are often used by developers to gain insights into the behaviour of concurrent programs by exploring the call stacks of threads. Nevertheless, contemporary live debuggers for concurrent programs are usually sequential debuggers augmented with the ability to display different threads in isolation. To these debuggers every thread call stack begins with a designated start routine and the calls that led to the creation of the thread are not visible, as they are part of a different thread. This requires developers to manually link stack traces belonging to related but distinct threads, adding another burden to the already difficult act of debugging concurrent programs. To improve debugging of concurrent programs we address the problem of incomplete call stacks in debuggers through a thread and debugger model that enables live debugging of child threads within the context of their parent threads. The proposed debugger operates on a virtual thread that merges together multiple relevant threads. To better understand the features of debuggers for concurrent programs we present an in-depth discussion of the concurrency related features in current live debuggers. We test the applicability of the proposed model by instantiating it for simple threads, local and remote promises, and a remote object-oriented database. Starting from these use cases we further discuss implementation details ensuring a practical approach.

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