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Debugging standard ML without reverse engineering

Authors:

Andrew P. Tolmach,

Andrew W. AppelAuthors Info & Claims

LFP '90: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming

Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/91556.91564

Published: 01 May 1990 Publication History

Abstract

We have built a novel and efficient replay debugger for our Standard ML compiler. Debugging facilities are provided by instrumenting the user's source code; this approach, made feasible by ML's safety property, is machine-independent and back-end independent. Replay is practical because ML is normally used functionally, and our compiler uses continuation-passing style; thus most of the program's state can be checkpointed quickly and compactly using call-with-current-continuation. Together, instrumentation and replay support a simple and elegant debugger featuring full variable display, polymorphic type resolution, stack trace-back, breakpointing, and reverse execution, even though our compiler is very highly optimizing and has no run-time stack.

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Cited By

Reichenbach CJuristo N(2021)Software ticks need no specificationsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results10.1109/ICSE-NIER52604.2021.00021(61-65)Online publication date: 25-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE-NIER52604.2021.00021
Monnier SSperber M(2020)Evolution of Emacs LispProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33863244:HOPL(1-55)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386324
Philips LDe Koster JDe Meuter WDe Roover C(2016)Dependence-driven delimited CPS transformation for JavaScriptACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093335.299324352:3(59-69)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
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Index Terms

Debugging standard ML without reverse engineering
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
      2. Language types

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cover image ACM Conferences

LFP '90: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming

May 1990

348 pages

ISBN:089791368X

DOI:10.1145/91556

Chairman:
Gilles Kahn

Copyright © 1990 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence
SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages
SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory
SIGSAM: ACM Special Interest Group on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation
INRIA: Institut Natl de Recherche en Info et en Automatique

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 1990

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LFP90

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LFP90: ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming

June 27 - 29, 1990

Nice, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 30 of 109 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

Reichenbach CJuristo N(2021)Software ticks need no specificationsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results10.1109/ICSE-NIER52604.2021.00021(61-65)Online publication date: 25-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE-NIER52604.2021.00021
Monnier SSperber M(2020)Evolution of Emacs LispProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33863244:HOPL(1-55)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386324
Philips LDe Koster JDe Meuter WDe Roover C(2016)Dependence-driven delimited CPS transformation for JavaScriptACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093335.299324352:3(59-69)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3093335.2993243
Philips LDe Koster JDe Meuter WDe Roover CFischer BSchaefer I(2016)Dependence-driven delimited CPS transformation for JavaScriptProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/2993236.2993243(59-69)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2993236.2993243
Lee BHirzel MGrimm RMcKinley K(2015)Debugging mixed-environment programs with BlinkSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.227645:9(1277-1306)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.2276
Visan AArya KCooperman GDenniston T(2011)URDBProceedings of the 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/2039239.2039251(1-5)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2039239.2039251
Ziarek LJagannathan S(2010)Lightweight checkpointing for concurrent mlJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679681000006720:2(137-173)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S0956796810000067
Lee BHirzel MGrimm RMcKinley KArora SLeavens G(2009)Debug all your codeProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications10.1145/1640089.1640105(207-226)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1640089.1640105
Lee BHirzel MGrimm RMcKinley K(2009)Debug all your codeACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1639949.164010544:10(207-226)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1639949.1640105
Kishon AHudak P(2008)Semantics directed program execution monitoringJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S09567968000014655:4(501-547)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2008
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796800001465
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