Enhancing Trace Debugging with Algorithmic and Omniscient Debugging

During many years, Print Debugging has been the most used method for debugging. Nowadays, however, industrial languages come with a trace debugger that allows programmers to trace computations step by step. Almost all modern programming environments include debugging utilities that allows us to place breakpoints and to inspect the state of a computation in any given point. Nevertheless, this debugging method has been criticized for being completely manual and time-consuming. Other debugging techniques have appeared to solve some of the problems of Trace Debugging, but they suffer from other problems such as scalability. In this work we present a new hybrid debugging technique. It is based on a combination of Trace Debugging, Algorithmic Debugging and Omniscient Debugging to produce a synergy that exploits the best properties and strong points of each technique. We describe the architecture of our hybrid debugger and our implementation that has been integrated into Eclipse as a plugin.