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A formal semantics for debugging synchronous message passing-based concurrent programs

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a semantic framework to debug synchronous message passing-based concurrent programs, which are increasingly useful as parallel computing and distributed systems become more and more pervasive. We first design a concurrent programming language model to uniformly represent existing concurrent programming languages. Compared to sequential programming languages, this model contains communication statements, i.e., sending and receiving statements, and a concurrent structure to represent communication and concurrency. We then propose a debugging process consisting of a tracing and a locating procedure. The tracing procedure re-executes a program with a failed test case and uses specially designed data structures to collect useful execution information for locating bugs. We provide for the tracing procedure a structural operational semantics to represent synchronous communication and concurrency. The locating procedure backward locates the ill-designed statement by using information obtained in the tracing procedure, generates a fix equation, and tries to fix the bug by solving the fix equation. We also propose a structural operational semantics for the locating procedure. We supply two examples to test our proposed operational semantics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    He Li, Jie Luo & Wei Li

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  1. He Li
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  2. Jie Luo
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  3. Wei Li
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Correspondence to He Li.

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Li, H., Luo, J. & Li, W. A formal semantics for debugging synchronous message passing-based concurrent programs. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 57, 1–18 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-014-5150-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-014-5150-4

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