[e-lang] looking for other distributed debuggers

[Matej Kosik]

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Terry Stanley wrote:
> I've been working on Causeway to make it more generally useful to
> developers debugging asynchronous message-passing programs. This
> effort includes writing a paper, which I'm considering submitting
> here:
> 
> http://debs08.dis.uniroma1.it/
> 
> Here's a link to the draft paper, which is pretty rough, only half written.
> 
> http://www.erights.org/elang/tools/causeway/causeway-paper.pdf
> 
> Trying to write the Related Works section has been pretty frustrating.
> Can anyone point me at debuggers built for the communicating event
> loops concurrency model?

I am not sure if Erlang's debugger (described in appendix E.2 on page 429 in the book

Joe Armstrong: Programming Erlang. Software for a Concurrent World.

(try to google this file:

	Pragmatic.Programming.Erlang.Jul.2007.pdf

)

is a kind of related work you are looking for. I have tried to use it but I did not like it.

One approach that worked for me is to record historical trace of processes, record it to file so
that I can later "go back in time" to see why something crashed or why something happed. The
aforementioned debugger cannot provide this kind of functionality. To be able to do that, I have to
intersperse my source code with small macros that record to logs
- - filename
- - line number
- - date and tim
- - (and optionally value of some relevant variable)
Recording that is laborious but it makes debugging possible (even though it is not very effective
way of doing things).

> 
> Thanks,
> Terry
> _______________________________________________
> e-lang mailing list
> e-lang at mail.eros-os.org
> http://www.eros-os.org/mailman/listinfo/e-lang
> 


- --
Matej
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