Debugging Standard ML Without Reverse Engineering (1990)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of the 1990 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming |
| Citations: | 43 - 3 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Tolmach90debuggingstandard,
author = {Andrew Tolmach},
title = {Debugging Standard ML Without Reverse Engineering},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 1990 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming},
year = {1990},
pages = {1--12},
publisher = {ACM Press}
}
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Abstract
We have built a novel and efficient replay debugger for our Standard ML compiler. Debugging facilities are provided by instrumenting the user's source code; this approach, made feasible by ML's safety property, is machineindependent and back-end independent. Replay is practical because ML is normally used functionally, and our compiler uses continuation-passing style; thus most of the program's state can be checkpointed quickly and compactly using call-with-current-continuation. Together, instrumentation and replay support a simple and elegant debugger featuring full variable display, polymorphic type resolution, stack trace-back, breakpointing, and reverse execution, even though our compiler is very highly optimizing and has no run-time stack. 1. Introduction Traditional "source-level" debuggers do their real work at machine level. They rely on detailed information about the underlying machine model, compiler back end, and runtime system. Although debuggers typically have access to t...
