Query-based debugging of object-oriented programs

Lencevicius, Raimondas; Hölzle, Urs; Singh, Ambuj K.

doi:10.1145/263698.263752

Cited by 47 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Similarly, Fox [PNB04] is a language to query over heap snapshots from a running program. With query-based languages tools [WPN06,LFL + 16] or debuggers [LHS97,LHS99] developers define queries to find particular objects based on their state.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object Miners: Acquire, Capture and Replay Objects to Track Elusive Bugs.

Costiou¹,

Kerboeuf²,

Toullec³

et al. 2020

JOT

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Elusive bugs are difficult to observe and to reproduce. They are often caused by non-deterministic or unexpected events, inputs or computations. To track elusive bugs, it is necessary to narrow down the scope of the bug investigation. This helps reproducing and observing very specific aspects of the program's state and behavior. In object-oriented programs, it often comes down to finding and debugging specific objects. However, some objects are particularly hard to find. Typical hard cases are finding a temporary object or a single particular instance of a given class. This is the case when debugging UI elements, or programs with non-deterministic state. This capability of identifying objects of interest is crucial to the debugging of objects. Yet, debuggers addressing this problem only provide manual or limited ways to find such objects. In this paper we present Object Miners: a non-intrusive object-centric debugging approach for acquiring, capturing and replaying objects. We show how the miners acquire objects at run time from the sub-results of an instrumented expression. Miners capture objects with their execution context and replay them to freeze strategic parts of the execution, eliminating non-determinism. We present a Pharo implementation of Object Miners along with a performance and memory overhead evaluation. We present a debugger built on top of Object Miners, and demonstrate through a series of examples how the application of Object Miners facilitates the tracking of elusive bugs. These examples include the fixing of a non-deterministic bug in an IOT application, tooling support for object-centric debugging, and the tracking of a bug in a real-world program.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object Miners: Acquire, Capture and Replay Objects to Track Elusive Bugs.

Costiou¹,

Kerboeuf²,

Toullec³

et al. 2020

JOT

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Lencevicius et al [12] introduced the query‐based approach to debugging and a corresponding tool. The debugger demonstrates capabilities for dynamic and on‐the‐fly queries in Java using load‐time code instrumentation.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Live interactive queries to a software application's memory profile

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Memory operations are critical to an application's reliability and performance. To reason about their correctness and track opportunities for optimisations, sophisticated instrumentation frameworks, such as Valgrind and Pin, have been developed. Both provide only limited facilities for analysing the collected data. This work presents a Valgrind's extension for examining a software applications' dynamic memory profile through live interactive analysis with SQL. The Pico COllections Query Library (pico ql) module maps Valgrind's data structures that contain the instrumented application's memory operations metadata to a relational interface. Queries are type-safe and the module imposes only a trivial overhead when idle. The authors evaluate the proposed approach on ten applications and through a qualitative study. They find 900 kb of undefined bytes in bzip2 that account for 12% of its total memory use and a performance-critical code execution path in the Unix commands sort and uniq. The referenced functions are part of glibc and have been independently modified to boost the library's performance. The qualitative study has users rate the usefulness, usability, effort, correctness, and expressiveness of PICO QL queries compared to Python scripts. The findings indicate that querying with PICO QL incurs lower user effort.

show abstract

“…Query‐based debugging was first proposed by Lencevicius et al . . In their approach, a query is formulated in a procedural style in the implementation language itself and run against current objects in the running program's heap.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

JI.FI: Visual test and debug queries for hard real‐time

Blanton

Lessa

Arora

et al. 2013

Concurrency and Computation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hard real-time systems have stringent timing and resource requirements. As such, debugging and tracing such systems often requires low-level hardware support, and online debugging is usually precluded entirely. In other areas, however, visual debugging has greatly improved program understanding and late cycle development times for nonreal-time applications. In this paper, we introduce a visual test and debug framework for hard real-time Java applications built around the JIVE platform and realized in the Fiji virtual machine.Our framework, called JI.FI ["dZIfi], provides high-level debugging support over low-level execution traces. JI.FI provides both powerful visualizations and real-time centric temporal query support. To ensure preservation of the real-time characteristics of the application being tested and debugged, JI.FI leverages a real-time event log infrastructure that logs only relevant application and virtual machine level events, such as synchronization and modifications to priorities or thread state. Our performance results indicate that our logging infrastructure is suitable for hard real-time systems, as the performance impact is both uniform and quantifiable. 2457dumps, requiring hardware support to be effective. This support is realized in the form of specific logic for capturing and filtering traces (logs), as well as buffers to store the trace itself. Unfortunately, such a setup only supports offline debugging via stored hardware traces.The loss of online symbolic debugging with breakpoints, stop-and-examine capabilities, and direct manipulation of program state due to real-time requirements creates a need for a replacement debugging technology. Pervasive software tracing with predictable performance coupled with offline tools capable of reconstructing detailed, symbolic debugger-style call graphs, and symbolic traces can help fill this need. Although many tools exist to help real-time embedded systems developers early in the software life-cycle, for instance to help debug models [5], only a handful of software tools exist for late life-cycle debugging [6].In this paper, we present the following contributions:1. An extensible visual debugging tool, JI.FI, for Java-based, hard real-time embedded systems built on the JIVE [7, 8] debugging platform. 2. A Java virtual machine (VM) independent, light-weight logging format to gather relevant debugging information for a given execution run. Unlike standard Java debug logging formats, this event log can be gathered in real-time. 3. A real-time aware temporal query processing engine able to answer temporal queries about the execution of the program. 4. An extension to the JI.FI system for debugging Safety Critical Java (SCJ) applications. 5. A detailed performance evaluation of the JI.FI system. This paper is an extended version of a work [9] that was previously published in the Proceedings of ACM JTRES 2012. This version includes details on an SCJ-specific extension to JI.FI and related evaluation; additional material on queries, including examples and ...

show abstract

Query-based debugging of object-oriented programs

Cited by 47 publications

References 30 publications

Object Miners: Acquire, Capture and Replay Objects to Track Elusive Bugs.

Object Miners: Acquire, Capture and Replay Objects to Track Elusive Bugs.

Live interactive queries to a software application's memory profile

JI.FI: Visual test and debug queries for hard real‐time

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About