71 research outputs found
Out-Of-Place debugging: a debugging architecture to reduce debugging interference
Context. Recent studies show that developers spend most of their programming
time testing, verifying and debugging software. As applications become more and
more complex, developers demand more advanced debugging support to ease the
software development process.
Inquiry. Since the 70's many debugging solutions were introduced. Amongst
them, online debuggers provide a good insight on the conditions that led to a
bug, allowing inspection and interaction with the variables of the program.
However, most of the online debugging solutions introduce \textit{debugging
interference} to the execution of the program, i.e. pauses, latency, and
evaluation of code containing side-effects.
Approach. This paper investigates a novel debugging technique called
\outofplace debugging. The goal is to minimize the debugging interference
characteristic of online debugging while allowing online remote capabilities.
An \outofplace debugger transfers the program execution and application state
from the debugged application to the debugger application, both running in
different processes.
Knowledge. On the one hand, \outofplace debugging allows developers to debug
applications remotely, overcoming the need of physical access to the machine
where the debugged application is running. On the other hand, debugging happens
locally on the remote machine avoiding latency. That makes it suitable to be
deployed on a distributed system and handle the debugging of several processes
running in parallel.
Grounding. We implemented a concrete out-of-place debugger for the Pharo
Smalltalk programming language. We show that our approach is practical by
performing several benchmarks, comparing our approach with a classic remote
online debugger. We show that our prototype debugger outperforms by a 1000
times a traditional remote debugger in several scenarios. Moreover, we show
that the presence of our debugger does not impact the overall performance of an
application.
Importance. This work combines remote debugging with the debugging experience
of a local online debugger. Out-of-place debugging is the first online
debugging technique that can minimize debugging interference while debugging a
remote application. Yet, it still keeps the benefits of online debugging ( e.g.
step-by-step execution). This makes the technique suitable for modern
applications which are increasingly parallel, distributed and reactive to
streams of data from various sources like sensors, UI, network, etc
Nested Pure Operation-Based CRDTs
Modern distributed applications increasingly replicate data to guarantee high availability and optimal user experience. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are a family of data types specially designed for highly available systems that guarantee some form of eventual consistency. Designing CRDTs is very difficult because it requires devising designs that guarantee convergence in the presence of conflicting operations. Even though design patterns and structured frameworks have emerged to aid developers with this problem, they mostly focus on statically structured data; nesting and dynamically changing the structure of a CRDT remains to be an open issue.
This paper explores support for nested CRDTs in a structured and systematic way. To this end, we define an approach for building nested CRDTs based on the work of pure operation-based CRDTs, resulting in nested pure operation-based CRDTs. We add constructs to control the nesting of CRDTs into a pure operation-based CRDT framework and show how several well-known CRDT designs can be defined in our framework. We provide an implementation of nested pure operation-based CRDTs as an extension to the Flec, an existing TypeScript-based framework for pure operation-based CRDTs. We validate our approach, 1) by implementing a portfolio of nested data structures, 2) by implementing and verifying our approach in the VeriFx language, and 3) by implementing a real-world application scenario and comparing its network usage against an implementation in the closest related work, Automerge. We show that the framework is general enough to nest well-known CRDT designs like maps and lists, and its performance in terms of network traffic is comparable to the state of the art
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
TOTAM: Scoped Tuples for the Ambient
Coordination of mobile applications posses a number of issues.
Devices should be able to communicate with each other without being connected with each other at the same time while maintaining privacy and limited network traffic. Current tuple based approaches solve these issues partially but none of them solves all of them. We propose a novel tuple space-based approach where tuple spaces are annotated with tuple space descriptors used to determine the scope of a tuple. The novelty of our approach lies in the use of these tuple space descriptors to determine that a tuple should be propagated before it is transmitted. This enhances privacy and decreases the burden on the network traffic in a wide range of applications
VeriFx: Correct Replicated Data Types for the Masses (Artifact)
Our related article presents our novel verification language, called VeriFx. We used VeriFx to implement and verify 51 Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and 9 Operational Transformation (OT) functions.
This artifact bundles the implementation of the various CRDTs and OT functions described in the article. The artifact also contains a Docker file that can be used to reproduce the verification results (Table 1 and 2 in the article). In addition, the artifact can also be used to run custom VeriFx programs and verify their correctness
VeriFx: Correct Replicated Data Types for the Masses
Distributed systems adopt weak consistency to ensure high availability and low latency, but state convergence is hard to guarantee due to conflicts. Experts carefully design replicated data types (RDTs) that resemble sequential data types and embed conflict resolution mechanisms that ensure convergence. Designing RDTs is challenging as their correctness depends on subtleties such as the ordering of concurrent operations. Currently, researchers manually verify RDTs, either by paper proofs or using proof assistants. Unfortunately, paper proofs are subject to reasoning flaws and mechanized proofs verify a formalization instead of a real-world implementation. Furthermore, writing mechanized proofs is reserved for verification experts and is extremely time-consuming. To simplify the design, implementation, and verification of RDTs, we propose VeriFx, a specialized programming language for RDTs with automated proof capabilities. VeriFx lets programmers implement RDTs atop functional collections and express correctness properties that are verified automatically. Verified RDTs can be transpiled to mainstream languages (currently Scala and JavaScript). VeriFx provides libraries for implementing and verifying Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and Operational Transformation (OT) functions. These libraries implement the general execution model of those approaches and define their correctness properties. We use the libraries to implement and verify an extensive portfolio of 51 CRDTs, 16 of which are used in industrial databases, and reproduce a study on the correctness of OT functions
CScript : a distributed programming language for building mixed-consistency applications
Current programming models only provide abstractions for sharing data under a homogeneous consistency model. It is, however, not uncommon for a distributed application to provide strong consistency for one part of the shared data and eventual consistency for another part. Because mixing consistency models is not supported by current programming models, writing such applications is extremely difficult. In this paper we propose CScript, a distributed object-oriented programming language with built-in support for data replication. At its core are consistent and available replicated objects. CScript regulates the interactions between these objects to avoid subtle inconsistencies that arise when mixing consistency models. Our evaluation compares a collaborative text editor built atop CScript with a state-of-the-art implementation. The results show that our approach is flexible and more memory efficient
ECROs: Building global scale systems from sequential code
Funding Information: We would like to thank Matteo Marra, Jim Bauwens, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments which helped improve the paper. Kevin De Porre is funded by an SB Fellowship of the Research Foundation - Flanders. Project number: 1S98519N. This work was partially supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia - Portugal (FCT/MCTES) under grants UIDB/04516/2020, PTDC/CCI-INF/32081/2017, and LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-032662/PTDC/CCI-INF/32662/2017.To ease the development of geo-distributed applications, replicated data types (RDTs) offer a familiar programming interface while ensuring state convergence, low latency, and high availability. However, RDTs are still designed exclusively by experts using ad-hoc solutions that are error-prone and result in brittle systems. Recent works statically detect conflicting operations on existing data types and coordinate those at runtime to guarantee convergence and preserve application invariants. However, these approaches are too conservative, imposing coordination on a large number of operations. In this work, we propose a principled approach to design and implement efficient RDTs taking into account application invariants. Developers extend sequential data types with a distributed specification, which together form an RDT. We statically analyze the specification to detect conflicts and unravel their cause. This information is then used at runtime to serialize concurrent operations safely and efficiently. Our approach derives a correct RDT from any sequential data type without changes to the data type's implementation and with minimal coordination. We implement our approach in Scala and develop an extensive portfolio of RDTs. The evaluation shows that our approach provides performance similar to conflict-free replicated data types for commutative operations, and considerably improves the performance of non-commutative operations, compared to existing solutions.publishersversionpublishe
Towards Meta-Level Engineering and Tooling for Complex Concurrent Systems
With the widespread use of multicore processors, software becomes more and more diverse in its use of parallel computing resources. To address all application requirements, each with the appropriate abstraction, developers mix and match various concurrency abstractions made available to them via libraries and frameworks. Unfortunately, today's tools such as debuggers and profilers do not support the diversity of these abstractions. Instead of enabling developers to reason about the high-level programming concepts, they used to express their programs, the tools work only on the library's implementation level. While this is a common problem also for other libraries and frameworks, the complexity of concurrency exacerbates the issue further, and reasoning on the higher levels of the concurrency abstractions is essential to manage the associated complexity. In this position paper, we identify open research issues and propose to build tools based on a common meta-level interface to enable developers to reasons about their programs based on the high-level concepts they used to implement them
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