Ruochen Wang | 汪若辰

Debugging is an essential yet often tedious part of the software development process. Omniscient debuggers have long aimed to make debugging easier by recording execution traces, enabling more direct debugging interactions. Although the concept of omniscient debugging has been explored extensively in research, it has seen limited adoption in industry until recently. The emergence of new commercial tools like Replay presents an opportunity to reevaluate the impact of omniscient debugging. In this paper, we conducted a controlled experiment with 20 participants with a commercial omniscient debugger, Replay, and a traditional debugger, Chrome DevTools. We investigated whether the omniscient debugger improved developer productivity and how it influenced debugging behavior. We coded developers’ navigation, rerun, and runtime value collection behaviors and summarized their debugging strategies. Our results show that developers with the omniscient debugger were not more successful or faster than those using the traditional debugger. Omniscient debugger users reran the program less, but there was no significant difference in the number of files or functions they explored or the number of runtime values they collected. Omniscient debugger users faced navigation and runtime value collection challenges, which may have hindered their effectiveness. Our results suggest that commercial omniscient debuggers must include more of the high-level support for interacting with traces found in research prototypes to successfully help developers in debugging tasks.

Rust is a programming language that uses a concept of ownership to guarantee memory safety without the use of a garbage collector. However, some error messages related to ownership can be difficult to understand and fix, particularly those that depend on value lifetimes. To help developers fix lifetime-related errors, we developed REVIS, a VSCode extension that visualizes lifetime-related Rust compiler errors. We describe the design and implementation of the VSCode extension, along with a preliminary evaluation of its efficacy for student learners of Rust. Although the number of participants was too low to enable evaluation of the efficacy of REVIS, we gathered data regarding the prevalence and time to fix the compiler errors that the participants encountered.