An extensible source-level debugger

ABSTRACT

Standard debuggers are limited in the amount of analysis that they perform in order to assist with debugging. This paper presents UDB, a source-level debugger for the Unicon programming language with a novel architecture and capabilities. UDB combines classical debugging techniques such as those found in GDB with a growing set of automatic debugging extensions. UDB tests the hypotheses that a debugger built on top of a high-level framework enables better debugging capabilities as well as easier and more efficient extension than ordinary debuggers.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ralph E. Griswold , Madge T. Griswold, The ICON Programming Language, Annabooks, 1996
• 2: Java Platform Debugging Architecture, http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jpda.
• 3: Clinton L. Jeffery, Program Monitoring and Visualization: An Exploratory Approach, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 1999
• 4: Jeffery, C. L., Mohamed, S., Pereda, R., and Parlett, R. 2004. Programming with Unicon. http://unicon.org/book/ub.pdf.
• 5: Lewis, B. Debugging Backward in Time. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Automated Debugging. AADEBUG 2003, September 2003, Ghent.
• 6: Nicholas Nethercote , Julian Seward, Valgrind: a framework for heavyweight dynamic binary instrumentation, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.42 n.6, June 2007
• 7: Ziad Al-Sharif. Debugging with UDB. Unicon Technical Report #10.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Code inspections and walk-throughs

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Debugging aids; Monitors

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
automatic debugging, debugging agent, monitoring framework, source level debugger