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Jikes RDB: A Debugger for the Jikes RVM

Jikes RDB: A Debugger for the Jikes RVM
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Conference Paper: PPPJ'13, September, 2013

The Jikes RVM is a meta-circular JVM serving as a leading platform for virtual machine research. Despite its popularity, the Jikes RVM still provides almost no debugging support. In this paper we present Jikes RDB, the Jikes RVM Debugger. RDB is non-invasive: it does not require any changes to the Jikes RVM. It is vertical: it integrates low-level and Java-level information to provide a complete view and complete control over the execution of the RVM. RDB's implementation is minimally redundant: as much as possible it uses the RVM's own code base for interpreting the state of the RVM. RDB is object-centric: it is centered around inspectors for the many different kinds of objects and data structures existing in a running RVM. This paper introduces RDB and demonstrates its use with a brief example.

@inproceedings{Makarov13, author = {Makarov, Dmitri and Hauswirth, Matthias}, title = {Jikes RDB: a debugger for the Jikes RVM}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools}, series = {PPPJ '13}, year = {2013}, isbn = {978-1-4503-2111-2}, location = {Stuttgart, Germany}, pages = {169--172}, numpages = {4}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2500828.2500847}, doi = {10.1145/2500828.2500847}, acmid = {2500847}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, keywords = {Java, debugger, virtual machine}, }