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ECOOP
2008
Springer

Practical Object-Oriented Back-in-Time Debugging

13 years 5 months ago
Practical Object-Oriented Back-in-Time Debugging
Back-in-time debuggers are extremely useful tools for identifying the causes of bugs. Unfortunately the "omniscient" approaches that try to remember all previous states are impractical because they consume too much space or they are far too slow. Several approaches rely on heuristics to limit these penalties, but they ultimately end up throwing out too much relevant information. In this paper we propose a practical approach that attempts to keep track of only the relevant data. In contrast to other approaches, we keep object history information together with the regular objects in the application memory. Although seemingly counterintuitive, this approach has the effect that data not reachable from current application objects (and hence, no longer relevant) is garbage collected. We describe the technical details of our approach, and we present benchmarks that demonstrate that memory consumption stays within practical bounds. Furthermore, the performance penalty is significantl...
Adrian Lienhard, Tudor Gîrba, Oscar Nierstra
Added 19 Oct 2010
Updated 19 Oct 2010
Type Conference
Year 2008
Where ECOOP
Authors Adrian Lienhard, Tudor Gîrba, Oscar Nierstrasz
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