icecream VS rr

Hey, very useful. Thanks! Similar to ic() for python, but with the nice ability to be used inline.

https://github.com/gruns/icecream

Icecream is great for this. Just calling ic(foo) gives you the same thing on stderr.

I get around this by using loguru (a wrapper around python's logger), so I get information like the calling function and line number with my debugging statements. I don't use it these days (and actually built something extremely similar around the same time), but icecream is another alternative that facilitates debugging-by-print

Most of the time I simply use icecream (a much better version of print()), and sometimes, I use pudb (a visual debugger) for tougher/trickier bugs.

We also have ice cream

I found icecream in a post on this subreddit and still use it as an alternative to print for debugging.

In the future using something like icecream might be interesting as well.

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

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.

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... )

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...

https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr?tab=readme-ov-file#system-...

> I've heard Linux support was down to like one guy [...]

Linux support is down to you. It's down to all of us. Install rr (https://rr-project.org/) and capture a crash with it.

Then you can replay the crash, find out that it's actually crashing in your closed-source graphics driver, which will motivate you to switch to an open source driver and fix your issue.

Also, while you're at it, update your linux kernel and wayland. They've both had bugs that could manifest as random firefox crashes in the last several months.