dspinellis/effective-debugging

Code examples used in the book Effective Debugging (Addison-Wesley, 2016)

Effective Debugging: Source Code

This repository contains the source code used in the book Effective Debugging (Addison-Wesley, 2016).

Chapter 1: High-Level Strategies

Item 7: Diversify Your Build and Execution Environment

• Demonstrate differences in the size of primitive elements among various architectures and operating systems

Chapter 2: General-Purpose Methods and Practices

Item 12: Automate Complex Testing Scenarios

• Demonstrate debugging through the embedding of Lua

Chapter 4: Debugger Techniques

Item 31: Familiarize Yourself with Reverse Debugging

• Simple program to demonstrate reverse debugging

Item 33: Look for Errors by Examining the Values of Variables and Expressions

• A doubly-linked list in Python

Item 37: Know How to View Assembly Code and Raw Memory

• Examples of how source code is compiled into assembly language

Chapter 5: Programming Techniques

Item 41: Add Logging Statements

• Logging in diverse languages and frameworks

Item 42: Use Unit Tests

• Unit testing of a simple C++ class

Item 43: Use Assertions

• Demonstration of assertions

Item 49: Fix the Bug's Cause, Rather Than Its Symptom

• Demonstrate and verify the use of modulo arithmetic rather than special cases

Chapter 6: Compile-Time Techniques

Item 50: Examine Generated Code

• Demonstrate how assembly code can reveal hidden method calls

Item 51: Use Static Program Analysis

• Demonstrate how FindBugs will report an incorrect spin loop

Item 52: Configure Deterministic Builds and Executions

• Demonstrate deterministic and non-deterministic builds

Item 53: Configure the Use of Debugging Libraries and Checks

• Examples demonstrating bugs caught by enabling compilation options

Chapter 7: Runtime Techniques

Item 57: Profile the Operation of Systems and Processes

• Demonstrate resource utilization issues

Item 59: Use Dynamic Program Analysis Tools

• Demonstrate the use of Valgrind to find memory errors

Chapter 8: Debugging Multi-threaded Code

Item 60: Analyze Deadlocks with Postmortem Debugging

• Programs that deadlock

Item 61: Capture and Replicate

• Source code used for the PinPlay demonstration

Item 62: Uncover Deadlocks and Race Conditions with Specialized Tools

• A race condition in Java
• Source code used for Intel Inspector XE demonstration

Item 64: Investigate Scalability Issues by Looking at Contention

• Demonstrate scalability problem due to lock contention

Item 65: Locate False Sharing by Using Performance Counters

• Demonstrate scalability problem due false sharing

Item 66: Consider Rewriting the Code Using Higher-Level Abstractions

• Demonstrate the speedup that can be obtained through the use of ATLAS
• Demonstrate speedup of R's mclapply function
• Demonstrate the concurrent name resolution of IP addresses