High-Level Debuggers: facilities and interfaces

Transcription

1 : facilities and interfaces Design and Development of a debug-oriented I.D.E. by Committee: Assistant Professor Michail G. Lagoudakis (Supervisor) Assistant Professor Katerina Mania Assistant Professor Vasilis Samoladas Departement of Electronic and Computer Engineering Technical University of Crete, 2009

2 What is this all about? From the broad spectrum of computer science we concern ourselves with the fields of: Programming Languages and Tools Human-Computer Interaction More specifically we deal with: Debugging Systems Integrated Development Environments (I.D.Es) By proposing both theoritically and technologically ways to improve these systems.

3 Outline Introduction - Background 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

4 Outline Introduction - Background 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

5 The Development cycle and debugging Debuggers are the cardiographs of software While the term debugger is attributed to Grace Hopper creator of Cobol... debugging as a process is in fact a general characteristic of all human labor.

6 Project workflow and I.D.Es The succession of programming processes, like coding and debugging, determine the project s workflow Debugging and testing cover roughly 50% of this workflow in time An I.D.E. automates and organizes the different parts of the workflow

7 Project workflow and I.D.Es Emacs was one of the first such integration environment system:

8 Project workflow and I.D.Es that set an example for modern I.D.Es (Anjuta)

9 Outline Introduction - Background 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

10 Debugging inner-workings System layers and facilities of debugging:

11 Debugging information flow A typical debugging information flow:

12 Symbolic debugging facilities A symbolic debugger like gdb: Allows you to monitor what is going on inside your program Start your program, specifing anyting that might affect it s behaviour Make your program stop on specified conditions Examine what has happened when your program stopped or crashed Change things in your program and continue execution

13 Symbolic debugging facilities Line by line navigation step in, step out, step over... Stack Examination backtrace, up, down... Breakpoints, Watchpoints, Catchpoints break main.c:37, watch <expr>... Data evaluation/editing print <expr>...

14 Front-Ends and I.D.Es Most I.D.Es today, supply a simple front-end to a symbolic debugger:

15 Debugging Systems While few, function as debugging systems providing some additional facilities, like DDD, Gnat or JBixle do:

16 Outline Introduction - Background The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

17 The current situation The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work Stagnation... Today s advancement in IDEs although constantly offering new features and facilites has left debugging system nearly where there were 20 or more years ago. Adoption of academically proposed features ranges from slow to none.

18 Outline Introduction - Background The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

19 High-Level debugging The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work Our Proposition: "High-level debugging systems" that can intergrate legacy technologies, not by just providing graphical access but by offering more sophisticated methods of monitoring a software system and new ways for a programmer to form his development cycle.

20 Outline Introduction - Background The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

21 Related Work Introduction - Background The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work Published Related Work Domain-specific debugging languages (Duel,opium, others) Replay, reverse debugging and tracing Language-aware tools, Harmonia Project Berkeley A lot of work on parallel execution

22 Related Work Introduction - Background The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work Related Technological Advancements Gdb 7.0 debugging-scripting, reverse execution JBixle call-graph and data-visualizations (much like ddd) ODB, Cisco debugger and others reverse execution Visual Studio s visualisers Mathematica Arbitary computation and math visualisations

23 Outline Introduction - Background 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

24 Rethinking the debugging information flow Rearranging the basics.. Figure: Before Figure: After

25 Outline Introduction - Background 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

26 The 5 pillars of our HLD System 1. Syntax-aware navigation and debugging breadth-first (bottom-up) navigation depth-first navigation (human mode) referenced variables instead of local symbol-browsing, completion, refactoring...

27 The 5 pillars of our HLD System 2. Data Visualisation Data as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks a generic A.P.I. for visualising language-oriented datatypes editing and updating, graph expansion, layout capabilites...

28 The 5 pillars of our HLD System 3. General-purpose extention language total control over our parser, visulisation sub-system, symbolic-debugger high-level debugging A.P.I. inter-language evaluation, python to C calls

29 The 5 pillars of our HLD System 4. Reverse Debugging Community proposal, high-priority project for FSF based on experimental work done for gdb our implementation integrates syntax-navigation i.e stepping back whole structures can exhibit memory enhancements through selective recording

30 The 5 pillars of our HLD System 5. Innovative interfaces New graphic widgets, dual-panel, graph-widget, console, icon groups... Fully scriptable, on-line extentible environment New project management and web-documentation approaches Speech input for basic debugging controls

31 Outline Introduction - Background 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

32 Overview Introduction - Background Five interconnected sub-systems constitute the core: the syntax-parser the symbolic debugger the graph-visualisation sub-system the extention environment and language the project-management module On top of them, lie: High-level debugging A.P.I User interface and facilities

33 Technologies Introduction - Background Over a dozen different technologies and software used. Multi-language approach in C and Python. syntax parser: flex, bison, libc, glib (n-ary trees), LALR(1) parser symbolic debugger: gdb/mi, PLY visualisation, interfaces: gtk+, pygtk, graphviz, dot-language, pocketsphinx, wsj-corpora project management: gnu-make, pkg-config hld-api and scripting: python-introspection, gdb/mi

34 Outline Introduction - Background Live Demo Future Work 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

35 Introduction - Background Live Demo Future Work

36 Outline Introduction - Background Live Demo Future Work 1 Introduction - Background 2 The current situation High-Level debugging Related Work 3 4 Live Demo Future Work

37 Live Demo Future Work Misha R.IDE innovative and complete This was only the beggining of our trip from an innovative I.D.E to a complete solution: Interfaces for legacy facilities: catchpoints, watchpoints, tracing Other common features of I.D.Es: refactoring, unit-testing, profiling, revisioning, ui-design

38 Live Demo Future Work H.L.D. system improvements We want to further integrate the syntax-parser with the rest of the system: for reverse-debugging memory optimizations for static code analysis on multi-threaded projects for call-graph representations and breakpoints to support incremental parsing

39 Live Demo Future Work Multi-Language, multi-purpose environments Probing Further: New ideas that have emerged Bidirectional seamless interconnection of more than two languages Desktop and web2.0 unification under one source Literal WYSIWYM programming..and much, much more in Misha R.evolution

40 Questions? Introduction - Background Live Demo Future Work