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Stack virtualization for source level debugging
Author(s) -
Ciabrini Damien
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.782
Subject(s) - computer science , debugging , programming language , call stack , stack (abstract data type) , code (set theory) , frame (networking) , virtual machine , emulation , source code , virtualization , function (biology) , operating system , set (abstract data type) , economics , economic growth , evolutionary biology , biology , cloud computing , telecommunications
The compilation of high‐level languages to general‐purpose execution platforms poses some challenges when it comes to debugging. Typically, abstractions that are not natively supported by the execution platform must be emulated with intermediate data structures and function calls. Unfortunately, the details of the emulation are visible in the execution stack, and this unwanted information greatly reduces the effectiveness of debuggers. This paper presents a general method for constructing a virtual view of the stack, in order to mask intermediate function calls that were generated to emulate high‐level abstractions, or even to recover logical frame information that was lost during the compilation process. In particular, virtual views enable the visualization of two disjoint code representations (e.g. native code and interpreted code) as a single unified stack. We illustrate this method by showing how to handle the compilation of Bigloo, a dialect of the Scheme programming language. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.