Source-level Debugging for Multiple Languages With Modest Programming Effort
We present techniques that enable source-level debugging for multiple
languages at the cost of only modest programming effort.
The key idea is to avoid
letting debugging requirements constrain the internal structure of the
compiler.
Constraints are minimized primarily by hiding the
source-language type system and target-machine representations from
the debugger.
This approach enables us to support a new language and compiler while
reusing existing elements:
a multi-language, multi-platform debugger;
the compiler's implementation of source-language types and expressions;
information already present in the compiler's private data structures;
and our compile-time support library,
which helps the compiler meet its obligations to the debugger
without exposing language-dependent details.
We evaluate our approach using two case studies: the production
compiler lcc and
an instructional compiler for MiniJava.
Full paper
A short version of this paper (16 pages) appears in the
14th International Conference on
Compiler Construction. We prefer this full, 21-page version,
which is available as
US Letter PostScript (178K),
US Letter PDF (126K), and
US Letter TeX DVI (91K).