A Concurrency-Agnostic Protocol for Multi-Paradigm Concurrent Debugging Tools

Today's complex software systems combine high-level concurrency models. Each model is used to solve a specific set of problems. Unfortunately, debuggers support only the low-level notions of threads and shared memory, forcing developers to reason about these notions instead of the high-level concurrency models they chose. This paper proposes a concurrency-agnostic debugger protocol that decouples the debugger from the concurrency models employed by the target application. As a result, the underlying language runtime can define custom breakpoints, stepping operations, and execution events for each concurrency model it supports, and a debugger can expose them without having to be specifically adapted. We evaluated the generality of the protocol by applying it to SOMns, a Newspeak implementation, which supports a diversity of concurrency models including communicating sequential processes, communicating event loops, threads and locks, fork/join parallelism, and software transactional memory. We implemented 21 breakpoints and 20 stepping operations for these concurrency models. For none of these, the debugger needed to be changed. Furthermore, we visualize all concurrent interactions independently of a specific concurrency model. To show that tooling for a specific concurrency model is possible, we visualize actor turns and message sends separately.Comment: International Symposium on Dynamic Language

Distributed architecture for an integrated development environment, large trace analysis, and visualization

ABSTRACT: Integrated development environments (IDEs) provide many useful tools such as a code editor, a compiler, and a debugger for creating software. These tools are highly sophisticated, and their development requires a significant effort. Traditionally, an IDE supports different programming languages via plugins that are not usually reusable in other IDEs. Given the high complexity and constant evolution of popular programming languages, such as C++ and even Java, the effort to update those plugins has become unbearable. Thus, recent work aims to modularize IDEs and reuse the existing parser implementation directly in compilers. However, when IDE debugging tools are insufficient at detecting performance defects in large and multithreaded systems, developers must use tracing and trace visualization tools in their software development process. Those tools are often standalone applications and do not interoperate with the new modular IDEs, thus losing the power and the benefits of many features provided by the IDE. The structure and use cases of tracing tools, with the potentially massive execution traces, significantly differ from the other tools in IDEs. Thus, it is a considerable challenge, one which has not been addressed previously, to integrate them into the new modular IDEs. In this paper, we propose an efficient modular client–server architecture for trace analysis and visualization that solves those problems. The proposed architecture is well suited for performance analysis on Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where resource limitations often prohibit data collection, processing, and visualization all on the same device. The experimental evaluation demonstrated that our proposed flexible and reusable solution is scalable and has a small acceptable performance overhead compared to the standalone approach