AGERE2017 Talk

Posted on October 23, 2017

Actoverse: A Reversible Debugger for Actors

Kazuhiro Shibanai & Takuo Watanabe
7th International Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control (AGERE 2017), Vancouver, Oct. 23, 2017.

Abstract

The Actor model is a concurrent computation model based on asynchronous message passing and shared-nothing principle. These characteristics and the absence of locks guarantee that actor-based programs can avoid simple concurrency bugs such as data races and deadlocks. However, they are not completely free from application level concurrency bugs that occur, for example, due to the indeterminate arrival order of messages.

To assist discovering such bugs in actor-based systems, we designed and implemented Actoverse, a debugger that adopts reverse debugging and provides an interactive aid for controlling the arrival order of messages upon re-execution. This paper briefly presents its architecture and utilization in Akka-based applications.

Publication

Kazuhiro Shibanai & Takuo Watanabe, Actoverse: A Reversible Debugger for Actors, In Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control (AGERE! 2017), pp. 50-57, ACM, Oct., 2017. DOI:10.1145/3141834.3141840,

The full-text of this paper is available without charge via this page (thanks to ACM Author-Izer Service).

Software