clement@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Clement Pellerin) (02/13/90)
Debugging concurrent programs is becoming a hot research topic. I hope to adapt Ada debugger technology to Concurrent C. Since Ada programmers have been writing concurrent programs for a long time, I suspect there must be some nice debuggers out there. We might learn some lessons because for now, debugging Concurrent C programs has been near to impossible. What is the state of debugger technology for Ada? I am especially interested in "methodologies" for debugging concurrent programs, i.e some theory as to how to go about it. Once a methodology is found, a debugger can be written to support it. The theory does not have to be mathematical. So how do YOU go about debugging concurrent tasks? Is debugging tasks as hopeless as debugging concurrent C processes? I would like a small description of what your favorite debugger can do together with any reference to articles that you've seen. thank you. -- news <clement Clement Pellerin, McGill University, Montreal, Canada clement@opus.cs.mcgill.ca
Loren@cup.portal.com (Loren Louis Hart) (02/14/90)
Most of the Ada debuggers are very nice, mostly because they are new and it doesn't make sense to use obsolute techniques on a new system that you are going to try to sell. The best approach for debugging multiple tasks is in a windowing environment. each task that you want to debug fires up it's own window and acts like it's own debugger. There are several systems like this, the one I am most familiar with is the Vax VMS debugger running on a Vaxstation. That particular debugger allows you to have one debugger per process. The Vax Debugger is not Ada spacific. I have also had good luck using the Verdix Debugger. I am sure I have missed some other good debuggers, but it is tough to stay current on all of them.