Practical domain-specific debuggers using the Moldable Debugger framework

Chiș, Andrei; Denker, Marcus; Nierstrasz, Oscar

doi:10.1016/j.cl.2015.08.005

Cited by 20 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…First, sub-method reflection enables fine grained reflection, at the AST level. This granularity is required by solutions and tools providing behavioral instrumentation within the body of methods, i.e., which only apply reflection to restricted parts of a method's body [1,9,10,21,56,64,65]. Second, partial behavioral reflection provides means to specify when reflection will be triggered, and which entities of the execution context will be reified.…”

Section: Why Reflectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

2020

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Context. Refining or altering existing behavior is the daily work of every developer, but that cannot be always anticipated, and software sometimes cannot be stopped. In such cases, unanticipated adaptation of running systems is of interest for many scenarios, ranging from functional upgrades to on-the-fly debugging or monitoring of critical applications.Inquiry. A way of altering software at run time is using behavioral reflection, which is particularly wellsuited for unanticipated adaptation of real-world systems. Partial behavioral reflection is not a new idea, and for years many efforts have been made to propose a practical way of expressing it. Many of these efforts resulted in practical solutions, but which introduced a semantic gap between the code that requires adaptation and the expression of the partial behavior.Approach. The idea of closing the gap between the code and the expression of the partial behavior led to the implementation of the Reflectivity framework. Using Reflectivity, developers annotate abstract syntax tree (AST) nodes with meta-behavior which is taken into account by the compiler to produce behavioral variations. Reflectivity is designed for dynamically typed systems which provide an AST representation of the program that is causally connected to the source code, and which support run-time recompilation. In this paper, we present Reflectivity, its API, its implementation in Pharo, its usage and limitations. We reflect on ten years of use of Reflectivity, and investigate in the literature how it has been used as a basic building block of many innovative ideas.Knowledge. Reflectivity has been used by 21 projects in the last decade, to implement reflective libraries or language extensions, code instrumentation, dynamic software update, debugging tools and software analysis tools. Our investigation shows that developers needed powerful and customized sets of heterogeneous reflection features for their projects, which Reflectivity provided. Despite its limitations, Reflectivity has proven to be a practical way of working with fine-grained reflective operations (at the AST level), and enabled a powerful way of dynamically add and modify behavior. By instrumenting through AST annotations, Reflectivity provides a flexible means to bridge the gap between the expression of the meta-behavior and the source code.Grounding. Reflectivity is actively used in research projects. During the past ten years, it served as a support for both implementation and fundamental base, for much research work including PhD theses, papers at conferences, workshops and in journals. Reflectivity is now an important library of the Pharo language, and is integrated in the standard distribution of the platform.Importance. Reflectivity exposes powerful abstractions to deal with behavioral adaptation, while providing a mature framework for unanticipated, non-intrusive, sub-method and partial behavioral reflection based on AST annotation. Finally, the AST annotation feature of Reflectivity opens new experimentation opportuni...

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Section: Why Reflectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Infinite recursions are solved by configuring the metalink not to trigger itself recursively (el). The Moldable debugger [9,10]. The Moldable Debugger is a framework to build domain-specific debuggers.…”

Section: Use-cases For Reflectivity's Feature Usagementioning

confidence: 99%

Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

2020

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“…In the system, the primary warning, intermediate warning, and advanced warning for Formula (3) correspond to yellow, orange, and red signals respectively. Finally, system debugging, including encoding debugging and function debugging, was carried out, and then the early warning and forecasting system could be applied [30]. The values involved in the warning system were the output data from the forecasting model, which referred to the transverse diffusion coefficient, the vertical diffusion coefficient, the degradation rate of pollutants, time, flow rate, and so on.…”

Section: Early Warning and Forecasting Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Warning and Forecasting System of Water Quality Safety for Drinking Water Source Areas in Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China

Ding

Zhang

Jiang

et al. 2017

Water

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Nowadays, the effects of water pollution accidents on water quality safety and regional residents' living have attracted worldwide attention. Therefore, the objective of this research is to propose an early warning and forecasting model and develop a visual system of water quality safety for drinking water source areas in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area under accident conditions. Based on an Instantaneous Point Source Two-dimensional Water Quality Model and the security requirements of water quality, an early warning and forecasting model was presented, and then the system was advanced by a MATLAB platform. In addition, a hypothetical case was also carried out for the Fenghuangshan drinking water source area. Within 0.040 h to 0.096 h after the accident, the water quality could meet the standard, and the warning level was primary and intermediate, sequentially. From 0.096 h to 11.960 h after the accident, the pollutant concentration exceeded the standard, under which conditions advanced warning started. Then the intermediate and primary warnings restarted in sequence until the pollutant concentration decreased to the background value. Therefore, the proposed model could accurately predict the spatial-temporal change trend of pollutant concentration, and the developed system could efficiently realize early warnings and the forecasting of water quality safety.

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“…Chiş et al [2015] followed this line of work with a debugger framework for domain-specific debuggers. They support domain-specific breakpoints, stepping operations, and debugger views.…”

Section: Novel Ide Designsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Marr¹,

Lopez

Aumayr³

et al. 2017

SIGPLAN Not.

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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 lowlevel 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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Practical domain-specific debuggers using the Moldable Debugger framework

Cited by 20 publications

References 66 publications

Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

Early Warning and Forecasting System of Water Quality Safety for Drinking Water Source Areas in Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China

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

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