Paper Details

A Debugger for Communicating Scala Objects

Authors: Bate, Andrew, Lowe, Gavin

Abstract:

This paper presents a software tool for visualising and reasoning about the behaviour of message-passing concurrent programs built with the CSO library for the Scala programming language. It describes the models needed to represent the construction of process networks and the runtime behaviour of the resulting program. We detail the manner in which information is extracted from the use of concurrency primitives in order to maintain these models and how these models are diagrammed. Our implementation of dynamic deadlock detection is explained. The tool can produce a sequence diagram of process communications, the communication network depicting the pairs of processes which share a communication channel, and the trees resulting from the composition of processes. Furthermore, it allows for behavioural specifications to be defined and then checked at runtime, and guarantees to detect the illegal usage of concurrency primitives that could otherwise lead to deadlock or data loss. Our implementation imposes only a small overhead on the program under inspection.

Proceedings:

Communicating Process Architectures 2012, Peter H. Welch, Frederick R. M. Barnes, Kevin Chalmers, Jan Bækgaard Pedersen, Adam T. Sampson, 2012, pp 135 - 154 published by Open Channel Publishing Ltd., Bicester

Files: Paper (PDF), Slides (PDF)

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