Inproceedings,
Multiverse Debugging: Non-deterministic Debugging for Non-deterministic Programs
33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, volume 134 of ECOOP'19, page 27:1--27:30. Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, (Jul 15, 2019)
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.27
Abstract
Many of today's software systems are parallel or concurrent. With the rise of Node.js and more generally event-loop architectures, many systems need to handle concurrency. However, its non-deterministic behavior makes it hard to reproduce bugs. Today's interactive debuggers unfortunately do not support developers in debugging non-deterministic issues. They only allow us to explore a single execution path. Therefore, some bugs may never be reproduced in the debugging session, because the right conditions are not triggered. As a solution, we propose multiverse debugging, a new approach for debugging non-deterministic programs that allows developers to observe all possible execution paths of a parallel program and debug it interactively. We introduce the concepts of multiverse breakpoints and stepping, which can halt a program in different execution paths, i.e. universes. We apply multiverse debugging to AmbientTalk, an actor-based language, resulting in Voyager, a multiverse debugger implemented on top of the AmbientTalk operational semantics. We provide a proof of non-interference, i.e., we prove that observing the behavior of a program by the debugger does not affect the behavior of that program and vice versa. Multiverse debugging establishes the foundation for debugging non-deterministic programs interactively, which we believe can aid the development of parallel and concurrent systems.
Tags
- actors
- ambienttalk
- concurrency
- debugging
- formalism
- formalsemantics
- memypublication
- multiverse
- myown
- nondeterminism
- redex
