Causal-Consistent Replay Reversible Semantics for Message Passing Concurrent Programs

Causal-consistent reversible debugging is an innovative technique for debugging concurrent systems. It allows one to go back in the execution focusing on the actions that most likely caused a visible misbehavior. When such an action is selected, the debugger undoes it, including all and only its consequences. This operation is called a causal-consistent rollback. In this way, the user can avoid being distracted by the actions of other, unrelated processes. In this work, we introduce its dual notion: causal-consistent replay. We allow the user to record an execution of a running program and, in contrast to traditional replay debuggers, to reproduce a visible misbehavior inside the debugger including all and only its causes. Furthermore, we present a unified framework that combines both causal-consistent replay and causal-consistent rollback. Although most of the ideas that we present are rather general, we focus on a popular functional and concurrent programming language based on message passing: Erlang.