Capturing the future by replaying the past (functional pearl)

Koppel, James; Scherer, Gabriel; Solar-Lezama, Armando

doi:10.1145/3236771

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…To understand how to capture and store the program counter and stack, we offer a brief explanation of continuations ( Koppel, Scherer & Solar-Lezama, 2018 ; Cong et al, 2019 ; Cong & Asai, 2016 ), which are pivotal to fulfilling this task. Functional programming languages, such as Scheme ( Kesley & Rees, 1995 ), provide an abstraction named continuation .…”

Section: Deloreanjsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Benefits, challenges, and usability evaluation of DeloreanJS: a back-in-time debugger for JavaScript

Leger

Ruiz

Fukuda

et al. 2023

PeerJ Computer Science

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JavaScript Web applications are a common product in industry. As with most applications, Web applications can acquire software flaws (known as bugs), whose symptoms are seen during the development stage and, even worse, in production. The use of debuggers is beneficial for detecting bugs. Unfortunately, most JavaScript debuggers (1) only support the “step into/through” feature in an execution program to detect a bug, and (2) do not allow developers to go back-in-time at the application execution to take actions to detect the bug accurately. For example, the second limitation does not allow developers to modify the value of a variable to fix a bug while the application is running or test if the same bug is triggered with other values of that variable. Using concepts such as continuations and static analysis, this article presents a usable debugger for JavaScript, named DeloreanJS, which enables developers to go back-in-time in different execution points and resume the execution of a Web application to improve the understanding of a bug, or even experiment with hypothetical scenarios around the bug. Using an online and available version, we illustrate the benefits of DeloreanJS through five examples of bugs in JavaScript. Although DeloreanJS is developed for JavaScript, a dynamic prototype-based object model with side effects (mutable variables), we discuss our proposal with the state-of-art/practice of debuggers in terms of features. For example, modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox include a debugger in their distribution that only support for the breakpoint feature. However DeloreanJS uses a graphical user interface that considers back-in-time features. The aim of this study is to evaluate and compare the usability of DeloreanJS and Mozilla Firefox’s debugger using the system usability scale approach. We requested 30 undergraduate students from two computer science programs to solve five tasks. Among the findings, we highlight two results. First, we found that 100% (15) of participants recommended DeloreanJS, and only 53% (eight) recommended Firefox’s debugger to complete the tasks. Second, whereas the average score for DeloreanJS is 71.6 (“Good”), the average score for Firefox’s debugger is 55.8 (“Acceptable”).

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Section: Deloreanjsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Benefits, challenges, and usability evaluation of DeloreanJS: a back-in-time debugger for JavaScript

Leger

Ruiz

Fukuda

et al. 2023

PeerJ Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Specification and Verification for Unrestricted Algebraic Effects and Handling

Song,

Foo,

Chin

2024

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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Programming with user-defined effects and effect handlers has many practical use cases involving imperative effects. Additionally, it is natural and powerful to use multi-shot effect handlers for non-deterministic or probabilistic programs that allow backtracking to compute a comprehensive outcome. Existing works for verifying effect handlers are restricted in one of three ways: i) permitting multi-shot continuations under pure setting; ii) allowing heap manipulation for only one-shot continuations; or iii) allowing multi-shot continuations with heap-manipulation but under a restricted frame rule. This work proposes a novel calculus called Effectful Specification Logic (ESL) to support unrestricted effect handlers, where zero-/one-/multi-shot continuations can co-exist with imperative effects and higher-order constructs. ESL captures behaviors in stages, and provides precise models to support invoked effects, handlers and continuations. To show its feasibility, we prototype an automated verification system for this novel specification logic, prove its soundness, report on useful case studies, and present experimental results. With this proposal, we have provided an extended specification logic that is capable of modeling arbitrary imperative higher-order programs with algebraic effects and continuation-enabled handlers.

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Capturing the future by replaying the past (functional pearl)

Cited by 2 publications

References 15 publications

Benefits, challenges, and usability evaluation of DeloreanJS: a back-in-time debugger for JavaScript

Benefits, challenges, and usability evaluation of DeloreanJS: a back-in-time debugger for JavaScript

Specification and Verification for Unrestricted Algebraic Effects and Handling

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