Fiddle: A Flexible Distributed Debugging Architecture

In the recent past, multiple techniques and tools have been proposed and contributed to improve the distributed debugging functionalities, in several distinct aspects, such as handling the non-determinism, allowing cyclic interactive debugging of parallel programs, and providing more user-friendly interfaces. However, most of these tools are tied to a specific programming language and provide rigid graphical user interfaces. So they cannot easily adapt to support distinct abstraction levels or user interfaces. They also don't provide adequate support for cooperation with other tools in a software engineering environment. In this paper we discuss several dimensions which may contribute to develop more flexible distributed debuggers. We describe Fiddle, a distributed debugging tool which aims at overcoming some of the above limitations.

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