Related papers: Tracers for debugging and program exploration
Static analyzers are tool sets which are proving to be indispensable to modern programmers. These enable the programmers to detect possible errors and security defects present in the current code base within the implementation phase of the…
Fixing a software error requires understanding its root cause. In this paper, we introduce ''causality traces'', crafted execution traces augmented with the information needed to reconstruct the causal chain from the root cause of a bug to…
Logs are widely used to record runtime information of software systems, such as the timestamp and the importance of an event, the unique ID of the source of the log, and a part of the state of a task's execution. The rich information of…
Dynamic languages are praised for their flexibility and expressiveness, but static analysis often yields many false positives and verification is cumbersome for lack of structure. Hence, unit testing is the prevalent incomplete method for…
Program synthesis is a class of regression problems where one seeks a solution, in the form of a source-code program, mapping the inputs to their corresponding outputs exactly. Due to its precise and combinatorial nature, program synthesis…
Coded computation is a method to mitigate "stragglers" in distributed computing systems through the use of error correction coding that has lately received significant attention. First used in vector-matrix multiplication, the range of…
Reversible debuggers help programmers to find the causes of misbehaviours in concurrent programs more quickly, by executing a program backwards from the point where a misbehaviour was observed, and looking for the bug(s) that caused it.…
Modern recommendation systems ought to benefit by probing for and learning from delayed feedback. Research has tended to focus on learning from a user's response to a single recommendation. Such work, which leverages methods of supervised…
We introduce a novel technique for finding real errors in programs. The technique is based on a synergy of three well-known methods: metacompilation, slicing, and symbolic execution. More precisely, we instrument a given program with a code…
Research is an incremental, iterative process, with new results relying and building upon previous ones. Scientists need to find, retrieve, understand, and verify results in order to confidently extend them, even when the results are their…
Detecting and fixing bugs are two of the most important yet frustrating parts of the software development cycle. Existing bug detection tools are based mainly on static analyzers, which rely on mathematical logic and symbolic reasoning…
It can be insightful to extend qualitative studies with a secondary quantitative analysis (where the former suggests insightful questions that the latter can answer). Documenting developer beliefs should be the start, not the end, of…
Synthesis is a particularly challenging problem for concurrent programs. At the same time it is a very promising approach, since concurrent programs are difficult to get right, or to analyze with traditional verification techniques. This…
Software release development process, that we refer to as "release trajectory", involves development activities that are usually sorted in different categories, such as incorporating new features, improving software, or fixing bugs, and…
With the rapid advancement of information technology, the complexity of applications continues to increase, and the cybersecurity challenges we face are also escalating. This paper aims to investigate the methods and practices of system…
Rust uses traits to define units of shared behavior. Trait constraints build up an implicit set of first-order hereditary Harrop clauses which is executed by a powerful logic programming engine in the trait system. But that power comes at a…
Debugging is an essential part of software maintenance and evolution since it allows software developers to analyze program execution step by step. Understanding a program is required to fix potential flaws, alleviate bottlenecks, and…
With recent advancements in large language models, methods like chain-of-thought prompting to elicit reasoning chains have been shown to improve results on reasoning tasks. However, tasks that require multiple steps of reasoning still pose…
Automated theorem provers are used in extended static checking, where they are the performance bottleneck. Extended static checkers are run typically after incremental changes to the code. We propose to exploit this usage pattern to improve…
Inductive theorem provers often diverge. This paper describes a simple critic, a computer program which monitors the construction of inductive proofs attempting to identify diverging proof attempts. Divergence is recognized by means of a…