Skip to main content
Kent Academic Repository

A Principled Approach Towards Debugging Communicating Event-loops

Torres Lopez, Carmen, Gonzalez Boix, Elisa, Scholliers, Christophe, Marr, Stefan, Mössenböck, Hanspeter (2017) A Principled Approach Towards Debugging Communicating Event-loops. In: 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control. . pp. 41-49. ISBN 978-1-4503-5516-2. (doi:10.1145/3141834.3141839) (KAR id:86672)

Abstract

Since the multicore revolution, software systems are more and more inherently concurrent. Debugging such concurrent software systems is still hard, but in the recent years new tools and techniques are being proposed. For such novel debugging techniques, the main question is how to make sure that the proposed techniques are sufficiently expressive. In this paper, we explore a formal foundation that allows researchers to identify debugging techniques and assess how complete their features are in the context of message-passing concurrency. In particular, we describe a principled approach for defining the operational semantics of a debugger. Subsequently, we apply this technique to derive the operational semantics for a communicating event-loop debugger. We show that our technique scales for defining the semantics of a wide set of novel breakpoints recently proposed by systems such as REME-D and Kómpos. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first formal semantics for debugging asynchronous message passing-based concurrency models.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Paper)
DOI/Identification number: 10.1145/3141834.3141839
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: 19 Feb 2021 11:17 UTC
Last Modified: 09 Dec 2022 06:19 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/86672 (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.