Debugging programs after structure-changing transformation
Jan F. Prins, Rickard E. Faith · 1998
Translators convert a program from one language to another, and are used to solve a wide range of problems, such as the construction of compilers, optimizers, and preprocessors. Although many tools support the creation of translators, these tools do not provide integrated support for debugging the translator or the output of the translator. This dissertation investigates the tracking of information necessary to provide debugging capabilities for those translators that are structured as a set of program transformations operating on a tree-based representation. In this setting I describe how basic debugging capabilities can be automatically and transparently defined without semantic knowledge of the languages being translated. Furthermore, advanced debugging support, relying on the semantics of the languages and transformations, can be incorporated into this basic framework in a systematic manner. To evaluate this approach I have constructed K scHEPERA, a program transformation system with integral support for the construction of debuggers. With this system I have explored debugging capabilities for traditional compiler optimizations, for more aggressive loop and parallelizing transformations, and for the transformation process itself. I also present algorithms that increase the performance of the transformation process.