research-article

A concurrency-agnostic protocol for multi-paradigm concurrent debugging tools

Authors:

Carmen Torres Lopez,

Dominik Aumayr,

Elisa Gonzalez Boix, and

Hanspeter MössenböckAuthors Info & Claims

DLS 2017: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on on Dynamic Languages

October 2017

Pages 3 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/3133841.3133842

Published: 24 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Cited By

Zschaler SBousse EDeantoni JCombemale B(2023)A generic framework for representing and analyzing model concurrencySoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-022-01073-222:4(1319-1340)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-022-01073-2
Aumayr DSmaragdakis Y(2019)Debugging support for multi-paradigm concurrent programsProceedings Companion of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity10.1145/3359061.3361074(38-40)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359061.3361074
Niephaus FFelgentreff THirschfeld RHosking AFinocchi I(2019)GraalSqueak: toward a smalltalk-based tooling platform for polyglot programmingProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3357390.3361024(14-26)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3357390.3361024
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A concurrency-agnostic protocol for multi-paradigm concurrent debugging tools
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. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DLS 2017: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on on Dynamic Languages

October 2017

86 pages

ISBN:9781450355261

DOI:10.1145/3133841

Program Chair:
Davide Ancona
University of Genova, Italy

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 52, Issue 11
DLS '17
November 2017
86 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/3170472
Editor:
Matthew Fluet
Rodchester Institude of Technology
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2017 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 the author(s) 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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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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SIGAda: ACM Special Interest Group on Ada Programming Language

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 October 2017

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SPLASH '17

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SIGPLAN

SPLASH '17: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 24, 2017

BC, Vancouver, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 32 of 77 submissions, 42%

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Citations

Cited By

Zschaler SBousse EDeantoni JCombemale B(2023)A generic framework for representing and analyzing model concurrencySoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-022-01073-222:4(1319-1340)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-022-01073-2
Aumayr DSmaragdakis Y(2019)Debugging support for multi-paradigm concurrent programsProceedings Companion of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity10.1145/3359061.3361074(38-40)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359061.3361074
Niephaus FFelgentreff THirschfeld RHosking AFinocchi I(2019)GraalSqueak: toward a smalltalk-based tooling platform for polyglot programmingProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3357390.3361024(14-26)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3357390.3361024
Niephaus FFelgentreff THirschfeld R(2018)GraalSqueakProceedings of the 13th Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems10.1145/3242947.3242948(30-35)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3242947.3242948
Mathur AOzkan BMajumdar RChechina NFrancalanza A(2018)iDeA: an immersive debugger for actorsProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang10.1145/3239332.3242762(1-12)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3239332.3242762
Aumayr DMarr SBéra CBoix EMössenböck HTilevich EMössenböck H(2018)Efficient and deterministic record & replay for actor languagesProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Managed Languages & Runtimes10.1145/3237009.3237015(1-14)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3237009.3237015
Torres Lopez CMarr SGonzalez Boix EMössenböck H(2018)A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based ProgramsProgramming with Actors10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_6(155-185)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_6
Torres Lopez CBoix EScholliers CMarr SMössenböck HDe Koster JBergenti F(2017)A principled approach towards debugging communicating event-loopsProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control10.1145/3141834.3141839(41-49)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3141834.3141839
Torres Lopez CVan Verre LGonzalez Boix ECastegren EDe Koster JFowler S(2021)What’s the problem? interrogating actors to identify the root cause of concurrency bugsProceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control10.1145/3486601.3486709(24-36)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3486601.3486709

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