Tracers for debugging and program exploration

2026-04-10

AI Summary

Existing debugging tools excel at verifying hypotheses but struggle to support hypothesis generation, as programmers must manually reconstruct the program’s state evolution. This work proposes a novel debugging paradigm centered on complete execution traces, leveraging program tracing techniques to record and temporally visualize the actual code paths executed, rather than relying on the static structure of the source code. By presenting runtime behavior in a chronological and contextualized manner, this approach significantly enhances the comprehensibility of program execution, thereby facilitating more efficient hypothesis generation during debugging. We implement a prototype system and conduct preliminary experiments that demonstrate its effectiveness in improving program understanding efficiency, while also uncovering key challenges and promising directions for future research.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Probabilistic Programming
• Natural Language Processing: Code Generation / Program Synthesis from Natural Language
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Diagnosis and Abductive Reasoning

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Programmers often use an iterative process of hypothesis generation ("perhaps this function is called twice?") and hypothesis testing ("let's count how many times this breakpoint fires") to understand the behavior of unfamiliar or malfunctioning software. Existing debugging tools are much better suited to testing hypotheses than to generating them. Step debuggers, for example, present isolated snapshots of the program's state, leaving it to the programmer to mentally reconstruct the evolution of that state over time. We advocate for a different approach: building a debugging and program-exploration tool around a *trace*, or complete history, of the program's execution. Our key claim is that the user should see every line *as executed* (in time order) rather than *as written* (in syntax order). We discuss design choices, preliminary results, and interesting challenges.

Problem

• debugging
• program exploration
• execution trace
• hypothesis generation
• program understanding

Innovation

• program trace
• debugging tool
• execution history
• hypothesis generation
• program exploration