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Dynamic Query-Based Debugging

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Book cover ECOOP’ 99 — Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1628))

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Abstract

Program errors are hard to find because of the cause-effect gap between the time when an error occurs and the time when the error becomes apparent to the programmer. Although debugging techniques such as conditional and data breakpoints help to find error causes in simple cases, they fail to effectively bridge the cause-effect gap in many situations. Dynamic querybased debuggers offer programmers an effective tool that provides instant error alert by continuously checking inter-object relationships while the debugged program is running. To speed up dynamic query evaluation, our debugger (implemented in portable Java) uses a combination of program instrumentation, load-time code generation, query optimization, and incremental reevaluation. Experiments and a query cost model show that selection queries are efficient in most cases, while more costly join queries are practical when query evaluations are infrequent or query domains are small.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Ambuj K. Singh

Authors
  1. Raimondas Lencevicius
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  2. Urs Hölzle
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  3. Ambuj K. Singh
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Rachid Guerraoui

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lencevicius, R., Hölzle, U., Singh, A.K. (1999). Dynamic Query-Based Debugging. In: Guerraoui, R. (eds) ECOOP’ 99 — Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1628. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48743-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48743-3_7

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66156-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48743-2

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