05.14.07

software tools: omniscient debugger

Posted in Hacking, programmer productivity at 9:41 am by ducky

Bil Lewis has made odb, an “omniscient debugger”. It saves every state change during the execution of a program, then lets you use the debugger to step forward through the execution or backwards. You don’t have to guess about why a variable has the value it does; you can quickly jump to the last place it was set.

This seems like an extremely useful way to do things! Bil Lewis wonders why more people aren’t using his better mousetrap: “(I don’t understand why. I’m clever, I’m friendly, I’m funny. Why don’t people go for my stuff? I dunnknow.) ”

I like it, but…

  • Its installation is a bit fragile. If you don’t know exactly what you are doing and do everything exactly right, there isn’t a whole lot of help to get you back on track. (If you are a Java stud and don’t make any mistakes, the installation is straightforward.)
  • It is not an IDE. It is a stand-alone tool. Yes, its web page says that it can be launched from inside Eclipse, but it sure looks like that just spawns it as a separate process: it doesn’t look like it plugs into the standard Eclipse debugger. That means that it has a separate learning curve and fewer features.
  • I worry that for programs larger than “toy” programs, the amount of data that it will have to collect will overwhelm my system’s resources. Will I be able to debug Eclipse, for example?

Now, if it were tightly integrated with Eclipse, like this internal C simulation tool that Cicso presented at EclipseCon, I would be All. Over. It. As it is, I’m probably going to use odb, but only occasionally.

Update 21 May 2007: There is an omniscient version of gdb! It’s called UndoDb.

Update 28 July 2008: There is a commercial Java omniscient debugger called Codeguide, and a research one called TOD (Trace-Oriented Debugger).  Also, Andrew Ko’s Designing the Whyline describes a user study of an omniscient debugger, although that fact that it is an omniscient debugger is kind of buried.

4 Comments

  1. Best Webfoot Forward » comparative programming linguistics said,

    May 21, 2007 at 8:40 pm

    […] Sometimes the various devotees will give a nod to the richness of their language’s libraries, or to the robustness of their compiler, but rarely. Recently, I’ve been working on a hobby project in PHP while reading up on tools like odb, JML, Daikon, Esc/Java2, javaspider, and EmmaECL. The contrast is stark. […]

  2. Best Webfoot Forward » VanDev talk summary said,

    February 6, 2008 at 9:30 pm

    […] debuggers: Debuggers like odb and undoDB keep track of every variable’s state change and then let you trace backwards to […]

  3. ducky said,

    October 25, 2008 at 11:13 am

    Chronomancer is a C/C++ debugger that I haven’t tried, but that says it lets you easily inspect and query traces. Some of the things advertised appear to be omniscient-debugger-ish.

    http://code.google.com/p/chronomancer/

  4. Best Webfoot Forward » Locally omniscient debugging said,

    May 4, 2009 at 4:23 pm

    […] Omniscient debuggers are one way to make it less tedious.  Run the code until it goes boom, then back up.  Unfortunately, omniscient debuggers capture so much information that it becomes technically difficult to store/manage it all. […]