2026-07-23T08:48:45Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:10819 2024-03-06T10:46:43Z ddc:004 open_access

Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs (Brave New Idea Paper) Torres Lopez, Carmen Gurdeep Singh, Robbert Marr, Stefan Gonzalez Boix, Elisa Scholliers, Christophe Debugging Parallelism Concurrency Actors Formal Semantics Many of today’s software systems are parallel or concurrent. With the rise of Node.js and more generally event-loop architectures, many systems need to handle concurrency. However, its non-deterministic behavior makes it hard to reproduce bugs. Today’s interactive debuggers unfortunately do not support developers in debugging non-deterministic issues. They only allow us to explore a single execution path. Therefore, some bugs may never be reproduced in the debugging session, because the right conditions are not triggered. As a solution, we propose multiverse debugging, a new approach for debugging non-deterministic programs that allows developers to observe all possible execution paths of a parallel program and debug it interactively. We introduce the concepts of multiverse breakpoints and stepping, which can halt a program in different execution paths, i.e. universes. We apply multiverse debugging to AmbientTalk, an actor-based language, resulting in Voyager, a multiverse debugger implemented on top of the AmbientTalk operational semantics. We provide a proof of non-interference, i.e., we prove that observing the behavior of a program by the debugger does not affect the behavior of that program and vice versa. Multiverse debugging establishes the foundation for debugging non-deterministic programs interactively, which we believe can aid the development of parallel and concurrent systems. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Carmen Torres Lopez and Robbert Gurdeep Singh and Stefan Marr and Elisa Gonzalez Boix and Christophe Scholliers 2019 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 134, 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.27 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-108192 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.27 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode