Omnipresent and low-overhead application debugging Robert Strandh
[email protected] LaBRI, University of Bordeaux Talence, France ABSTRACT application programmers as opposed to system programmers. The state of the art in application debugging in free Common The difference, in the context of this paper, is that the tech- Lisp implementations leaves much to be desired. In many niques that we suggest are not adapted to debugging the cases, only a backtrace inspector is provided, allowing the system itself, such as the compiler. Instead, throughout this application programmer to examine the control stack when paper, we assume that, as far as the application programmer an unhandled error is signaled. Most such implementations do is concerned, the semantics of the code generated by the not allow the programmer to set breakpoints (unconditional compiler corresponds to that of the source code. or conditional), nor to step the program after it has stopped. In this paper, we are mainly concerned with Common Furthermore, even debugging tools such as tracing or man- Lisp [1] implementations distributed as so-called FLOSS, i.e., ually calling break are typically very limited in that they do \Free, Libre, and Open Source Software". While some such not allow the programmer to trace or break in important sys- implementations are excellent in terms of the quality of the tem functions such as make-instance or shared-initialize, code that the compiler generates, most leave much to be simply because these tools impact all callers, including those desired when it comes to debugging tools available to the of the system itself, such as the compiler.