flow-storm-debugger
rr
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flow-storm-debugger | rr | |
---|---|---|
33 | 102 | |
626 | 8,640 | |
2.4% | 1.3% | |
9.5 | 9.6 | |
10 days ago | 3 days ago | |
Clojure | C++ | |
The Unlicense | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
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flow-storm-debugger
- FlowStorm a omniscient time travel debugger for Clojure/CLJS
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What I Have Changed My Mind About in Software Development
Tracing debuggers give you the best of both worlds. I've recently started using Flow-storm [0], by @jpmonettas), and it's been quite transformative. You can still easily see the values flowing through your system (better than just "prints"), and it can handle multi-threaded / async scenarios quite nicely. You don't need to manually step through code, you can just "see" your data flow, and when you have loops or some other form of iteration, you can see the data for each pass. Coupling this with a good data visualization tool (such as Portal [1]) really feels like magic. I've been doing Clojure for quite a few years now, and was very happy with my plain REPL-driven workflow, but this is way better.
[0] https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger
[1] https://github.com/djblue/portal
- ANN ClojureStorm: Omniscient time travel debugging for Clojure
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What a good debugger can do
This is another example, a tracing time travel debugger for Clojure https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger
Supports a bunch of stuff described there and more.
Lisps have some good tooling around debugging, for example clojure's flowstorm or common lisp which has built into the language most of what this article is talking about.
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Debugging Lisp: trace options, break on conditions
There's some good debugging tooling for Clojure as well. A recent entrant is https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger and of course there's the estabilished pretty full featured debugging features in CIDER (Emacs), Calva (VS Code) and Cursive (IntelliJ). And for barebones tracing from REPL there's goo old clojure.tools.trace.
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FlowStorm - Flow Docs, experimental execution derived documentation for Clojure
For Emacs there is something already if you use the Emacs integration described here https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger/tree/flow-docs/editors.
- Clojure at the REPL: Data Visualization
- [ANN] FlowStorm Clojure[Script] debugger 3.1.259 is out
- Debugging ClojureScript applications with FlowStorm
rr
- rr: Lightweight Recording and Deterministic Debugging
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Hermit is a hermetic and reproducible sandbox for running programs
I think this tool must share a lot techniques and use cases with rr. I wonder how it compares in various aspects.
https://rr-project.org/
rr "sells" as a "reversible debugger", but it obviously needs the determinism for its record and replay to work, and AFAIK it employs similar techniques regarding system call interception and serializing on a single CPU. The reversible debugger aspect is built on periodic snapshotting on top of it and replaying from those snapshots, AFAIK. They package it in a gdb compatible interface.
Hermit also lists record/replay as a motivation, although it doesn't list reversible debugging in general.
- Rr: Lightweight Recording and Deterministic Debugging
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Deep Bug
Interesting. Perhaps you can inspect the disassembly of the function in question when using Graal and HotSpot. It is likely related to that.
Another debugging technique we use for heisenbugs is to see if `rr` [1] can reproduce it. If it can then that's great as it allows you to go back in time to debug what may have caused the bug. But `rr` is often not great for concurrency bugs since it emulates a single-core machine. Though debugging a VM is generally a nightmare. What we desperately need is a debugger that can debug both the VM and the language running on top of it. Usually it's one or the other.
> In general I’d argue you haven’t fixed a bug unless you understand why it happened and why your fix worked, which makes this frustrating, since every indication is that the bug exists within proprietary code that is out of my reach.
Were you using Oracle GraalVM? GraalVM community edition is open source, so maybe it's worth checking if it is reproducible in that.
[1]: https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr
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So you think you want to write a deterministic hypervisor?
https://rr-project.org/ had the same problem. They use the retired conditional branch counter instead of instruction counter, and then instruction steeping until at the correct address.
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Is Something Bugging You?
That'll work great for your Distributed QSort Incorporated startup, where the only product is a sorting algorithm.
Formal software verification is very useful. But what can be usefully formalized is rather limited, and what can be formalized correctly in practice is even more limited. That means you need to restrict your scope to something sane and useful. As a result, in the real world running thousands of tests is practically useful. (Well, it depends on what those tests are; it's easy to write 1000s of tests that either test the same thing, or only test the things that will pass and not the things that would fail.) They are especially useful if running in a mode where the unexpected happens often, as it sounds like this system can do. (It's reminiscent of rr's chaos mode -- https://rr-project.org/ linking to https://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/02/introducing-rr-chaos-mo... )
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When "letting it crash" is not enough
The approach of check-pointing computation such that it is resumable and restartable sounds similar to a time-traveling debugger, like rr or WinDbg:
https://rr-project.org/
https://learn.microsoft.com/windows-hardware/drivers/debugge...
- When I got started I debugged using printf() today I debug with print()
- Rr: Record and Replay Debugger – Reverse Debugger
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OpenBSD KDE Plasma Desktop
https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr?tab=readme-ov-file#system-...
What are some alternatives?
test-refresh - Refreshes and reruns clojure.tests in your project.
CodeLLDB - A native debugger extension for VSCode based on LLDB
hashp - A better "prn" for debugging
rrweb - record and replay the web
sayid - A debugger for Clojure
gef - GEF (GDB Enhanced Features) - a modern experience for GDB with advanced debugging capabilities for exploit devs & reverse engineers on Linux
logseq - A local-first, non-linear, outliner notebook for organizing and sharing your personal knowledge base. Use it to organize your todo list, to write your journals, or to record your unique life.
Module Linker - browse modules by clicking directly on "import" statements on GitHub
scope-capture - Project your Clojure(Script) REPL into the same context as your code when it ran
nbdev - Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks
portal - A clojure tool to navigate through your data.
clog-cli - Generate beautiful changelogs from your Git commit history