Cauder: A causal-consistent reversible debugger for erlang

Abstract

Programming languages based on the actor model, such as Erlang, avoid some concurrency bugs by design. However, other concurrency bugs, such as message order violations and livelocks, can still show up in programs. These hard-to-find bugs can be more easily detected by using causal-consistent reversible debugging, a debugging technique that allows one to traverse a computation both forward and backward. Most notably, causal consistency implies that, when going backward, an action can only be undone provided that its consequences, if any, have been undone beforehand. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first causal-consistent reversible debugger for Erlang, which may help programmers to detect and fix various kinds of bugs, including message order violations and livelocks.