Time-Travel Debugging Java Applications

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Time-Travel Debugging Java applications Greg Law, co-founder Debugging - our dirty secret Programming is debugging Most software is not truly understood by anyone What happened? printf, printf, printf Why can’t the computer just tell us? 2 3 In the beginning Sir Maurice Wilkes, 1913-2010 In the beginning I well remember [...] the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs Sir Maurice Wilkes, 1913-2010 Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? Brian Kernighan Computers are hard What happened? What makes bugs really hard? Repeatability Time between the root cause and effect being noticed What happened?was the previous state? Two options: 1. Save it. 2. Recompute it. a = a + 1 ✓ a = b ✗ Snapshots Maintain snapshots through history Resume from these - run forward as needed Copy-on-Write for memory efficiency Adjust spacing to anticipate user’s needs Event log Event Log captures non-deterministic state Recorded during debug (or Live Recording) Stored in memory Replayed to reconstruct any point in history Efficient, diff-based representation Saved to create a recording file for later use Instrumentation Undo Engine captures all non-determinism Some machine instructions are non-deterministic rdtsc, cpuid, syscall, etc Needs to capture all this and provide precise control over execution in general Solution: Runtime instrumentation Works well in conjunction with live logging & tracing Logging & tracing give a high-level ‘story’ of a program’s execution Use it to know where to go in a recording Apply logging to a recording 80/20 Rule 80/20 Rule Multiple implementations For Linux: ● Undo LiveRecorder (C++, Go, Java) ● rr (C++, Go) ● gdb process record For Windows: ● Microsoft’s Time-Travel Debugger (C++, C#, Chakracore JS) ● RevDebug (C#, Java) Cross platform ● Chronon debugger ● Omniscient debugger 1. Computers are hard & debugging is under-served 2. Time Travel is awesome! 3. 80/20 rule does not always apply.

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