Interacting with dead objects

Abstract

Debugging and analyzing a snapshot of a crashed program's memory is far more difficult than working with a live program, because debuggers can no longer execute code to help make sense of the program state. We present an architecture that supports the restricted execution of ordinary code starting from the snapshot, as if the dead objects within it had been restored, but without access to their original external environment. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach via an implementation for Java that does not require a custom virtual machine, show that it performs competitively with live execution, and use it to diagnose an unresolved memory leak in a mature mainstream application.