Abstract
Causal-consistent reversible debugging allows one to explore concurrent computations back and forth in order to locate the source of an error. In this setting, backward steps can be chosen freely as long as they are causal consistent, i.e., as long as all the actions that depend on the action we want to undo have been already undone. Here, we consider a framework for causal-consistent reversible debugging in the functional and concurrent language Erlang. This framework considered programs translated to an intermediate representation, called Core Erlang. Although using such an intermediate representation simplified both the formal definitions and their implementation in a debugging tool, the choice of Core Erlang also complicated the use of the debugger. In this paper, we extend the framework in order to deal with source Erlang programs, also including some features that were not considered before. Moreover, we integrate the two existing approaches (user-driven debugging and replay debugging) into a single, more general framework, and develop a new version of the debugging tool CauDEr including all the mentioned extensions as well as a renovated user interface.
This work has been partially supported by EU (FEDER) and Spanish MCI/AEI under grants TIN2016-76843-C4-1-R and PID2019-104735RB-C41, by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant Prometeo/2019/098 (DeepTrust), and by French ANR project DCore ANR-18-CE25-0007.
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Notes
- 1.
To the best of our knowledge, CauDEr is the first causal-consistent reversible debugger for a realistic programming language. Previous approaches did not consider concurrency, only allowed a deterministic replay—e.g., the case of rr [15] and ocamldebug [12]—or considered a very simple language, as in [2]. The reader is referred to [11] for a detailed comparison of CauDEr with other, related approaches.
- 2.
Note that the state of the process is represented by the argument of the call to function \(\mathtt{server}\).
- 3.
In Erlang, function calls are often prefixed by the module where the function is defined.
- 4.
Here, we use the auxiliary function \(\mathsf {match\_rec}\) to select the matching clause, so that it returns the matching substitution as well as the body of the selected clause.
- 5.
The extension to n steps is straightforward. We omit it for simplicity.
- 6.
Note that, if the process’ log is empty, only the first two rules are applicable; in other words, the user must provide feasible requests to drive the forward computation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Ivan Lanese for his useful remarks that helped us to improve the new version of the CauDEr debugger.
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González-Abril, J.J., Vidal, G. (2021). Causal-Consistent Reversible Debugging: Improving CauDEr. In: Morales, J.F., Orchard, D. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12548. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67438-0_9
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