Out-Of-Place debugging: a debugging architecture to reduce debugging interference

Marra, Matteo; Polito, Guillermo; Boix, Elisa Gonzalez

doi:10.22152/programming-journal.org/2019/3/3

Cited by 6 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Remote debugging [33] Interception of messages sent to (remote) file objects, and dynamically replacing them by calls to proxies performing remote access to the real files.…”

Section: Ide Enhancementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

2020

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Context. Refining or altering existing behavior is the daily work of every developer, but that cannot be always anticipated, and software sometimes cannot be stopped. In such cases, unanticipated adaptation of running systems is of interest for many scenarios, ranging from functional upgrades to on-the-fly debugging or monitoring of critical applications.Inquiry. A way of altering software at run time is using behavioral reflection, which is particularly wellsuited for unanticipated adaptation of real-world systems. Partial behavioral reflection is not a new idea, and for years many efforts have been made to propose a practical way of expressing it. Many of these efforts resulted in practical solutions, but which introduced a semantic gap between the code that requires adaptation and the expression of the partial behavior.Approach. The idea of closing the gap between the code and the expression of the partial behavior led to the implementation of the Reflectivity framework. Using Reflectivity, developers annotate abstract syntax tree (AST) nodes with meta-behavior which is taken into account by the compiler to produce behavioral variations. Reflectivity is designed for dynamically typed systems which provide an AST representation of the program that is causally connected to the source code, and which support run-time recompilation. In this paper, we present Reflectivity, its API, its implementation in Pharo, its usage and limitations. We reflect on ten years of use of Reflectivity, and investigate in the literature how it has been used as a basic building block of many innovative ideas.Knowledge. Reflectivity has been used by 21 projects in the last decade, to implement reflective libraries or language extensions, code instrumentation, dynamic software update, debugging tools and software analysis tools. Our investigation shows that developers needed powerful and customized sets of heterogeneous reflection features for their projects, which Reflectivity provided. Despite its limitations, Reflectivity has proven to be a practical way of working with fine-grained reflective operations (at the AST level), and enabled a powerful way of dynamically add and modify behavior. By instrumenting through AST annotations, Reflectivity provides a flexible means to bridge the gap between the expression of the meta-behavior and the source code.Grounding. Reflectivity is actively used in research projects. During the past ten years, it served as a support for both implementation and fundamental base, for much research work including PhD theses, papers at conferences, workshops and in journals. Reflectivity is now an important library of the Pharo language, and is integrated in the standard distribution of the platform.Importance. Reflectivity exposes powerful abstractions to deal with behavioral adaptation, while providing a mature framework for unanticipated, non-intrusive, sub-method and partial behavioral reflection based on AST annotation. Finally, the AST annotation feature of Reflectivity opens new experimentation opportuni...

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“…Remote debugging [33] Interception of messages sent to (remote) file objects, and dynamically replacing them by calls to proxies performing remote access to the real files.…”

Section: Ide Enhancementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contribution IDRA is a remote debugger for distributed Pharo applications [33]. It consists of a master debugger connected to workers, i.e., machines or devices, on which execute instances of the program.…”

Section: B3 Debuggingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

2020

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“…This means that they do not copy stack frames, but add a proxy to each of the frames. This makes their approach susceptible to debugging interference due to the use of network communication for every operation that needs to be done [14]. Furthermore, their approach focuses specifically on promises, and is not directly adaptable to other frameworks: they present an approach to concatenate stack of promises, while our approach provides five other operations that are combinable and applicable to other scenarios.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framework-aware debugging with stack tailoring

Marra

Polito

Boix

2020

Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages

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Debugging applications that execute within a framework is not always easy: the call-stack offered to developers is often a mix-up of stack frames that belong to different frameworks, introducing an unnecessary noise that prevents developers from focusing on the debugging task. Moreover, relevant application code is not always available in the call-stack because it may have already returned, or is available in another thread. In such cases, manually gathering all relevant information from these different sources is not only cumbersome but also costly.In this paper we introduce Sarto, a call-stack instrumentation layer that allows developers to tailor the stack to make debugging framework-aware. The goal is to improve the quality and amount information present in the call-stack to reduce debugging time without impacting the execution time. Sarto proposes a set of six stack operations that combined hide irrelevant information, introduce missing information, and relate dispersed debugging sources before this is fed to the debugger.We validate Sarto by applying it to four application cases using inherently different frameworks: unit testing, web server, remote promises and big data processing. We showcase our experiences in using Sarto in the different frameworks, and perform some performance benchmarks to demonstrate that Sarto does not generate noticeable overhead when instrumenting a call-stack. We also show that our solution reduces by half the amount of data stored to debug similar exceptions happening in a parallel setup.CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Application specific development environments; Integrated and visual development environments; Error handling and recovery; Software testing and debugging.

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“…In this paper, we propose a novel online debugging solution targeted to Big Data applications. In prior work, we proposed out-of-place debugging [18], an online debugging architecture which transfers the debugging session to an external process, in which the developer can debug in an isolated way. Based on this, we augment out-of-place debugging with dedicated features to allow debugging of Map/Reduce applications.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%