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Thu, 24 Jul 2003
Timewarp debugging
Kim Burchett posted on simplifying debugging. There are a couple of good points in the post:
  1. The presence of state makes debugging a pain. This arguest for a more functional approach to programing wherever possible.
  2. Something like a timewarp or replay debugger that captured the state of the program at every state transition could help with these problems. In languages that reify activation records (as closures or continuations), this should not be that difficult to do, albeit hugely expensive in memory.
There's also some work that was done in the 90s' on reversible debugging.

Elliotte Rusty Harold's request for conditional breakpoints based on the contents of the call stack:

I'd like to be able to set a breakpoint that's conditional on another method being executed. For example, I'd like to stop in the startMakingElement method, but only when the testZ method has been called. I don't want to stop in startMakingElement for testA through testY
is just icing on the cake.

Seems like debugger folks have a lot of work to do. At least until James Robertson posts and tells us that all of this can be done in VisualWorks ;-). In the meantime, the IntelliJ and Eclipse folks should get busy.

[01:04] | [computers/programming] | # | TB | F | G | 2 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
Ted Leung points out a C developer who wants better debugging:
  • The presence of state makes debugging a pain. This arguest for a more functional approach to programing wherever possible
  • Something like a timewarp or replay debugger that captured the state of the program at every state transition could help with these problems. In languages that reify activation records (as closures or continuations), this should not be that difficult to do, albeit hugely expensive in memory.

hmm. We have this in languages like Lisp and Smalltalk (as alluded to above). Maybe the Kim needs better tools. And yes Ted, the
Posted by Trackback from Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants at Thu Jul 24 04:52:47 2003



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