Program State Visualizer with User-Defined Representation Conversion (WIP)
Pages 5 - 10
Abstract
Conventional non-visual tree-based debuggers possess comprehensibility issues, which include the obscurity of object references, patterns, and overall program structure. Visual debuggers — specifically, ones that display an object diagram to represent the program state — alleviate these issues for imperative programming languages whose very states are directly manipulated by the programmer’s statements. However, these debuggers are also prone to clutter when representing large program states from visualizing too much information. Additionally, the visualized program state can often differ from its conceptual abstraction on paper. We propose user-defined representation conversion which allows users to convert concrete representations of program states to their more focused and abstracted conceptual versions. We design a DSL such that users can specify conversions to manipulate displayed nodes and edges based on object types, references, values, or debugger halt locations. We implemented a prototype of this concept for Java.
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Index Terms
- Program State Visualizer with User-Defined Representation Conversion (WIP)
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Published: 17 July 2023
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DEBT '23
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DEBT '23: 1st ACM International Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques
July 17, 2023
WA, Seattle, USA
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