A Declarative Debugger for Concurrent Erlang Programs

Abstract

Erlang is a concurrent language with features such as actor model concurrency, no shared memory, message passing communication, high scalability and availability. However, the development of concurrent programs is a complex and error prone task. In this paper we present a declarative debugging approach for concurrent Erlang programs. Our debugger asks questions about the validity of transitions between the different points of the program that involve message passing and/or process creation. The answers, which represent the intended behavior of the program, are compared with the transitions obtained in an actual execution of the program. The differences allow us to detect program errors and to point out the pieces of source code responsible for the bugs. In order to represent the computations we present a semantic calculus for concurrent Core Erlang programs. The debugger uses the proof trees in this calculus as debugging trees used for selecting the questions asked to the user. The relation between the debugging trees and the semantic calculus allows us to establish the soundness of the approach. The theoretical ideas have been implemented in a debugger prototype.