Skip to main content

A Concurrency-Agnostic Protocol for Multi-Paradigm Concurrent Debugging Tools

Marr, Stefan, Torres Lopez, Carmen, Aumayr, Dominik, Gonzalez Boix, Elisa, Mössenböck, Hanspeter (2017) A Concurrency-Agnostic Protocol for Multi-Paradigm Concurrent Debugging Tools. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages. (doi:10.1145/3133841.3133842) (KAR id:63810)

Abstract

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 low-level 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.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Paper)
DOI/Identification number: 10.1145/3133841.3133842
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science)
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Stefan Marr
Date Deposited: 08 Nov 2017 22:48 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Feb 2021 13:49 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/63810 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.