[llvm-dev] [GSoC 2018] Improve Debugging of Optimized Code

[Greg Bedwell via llvm-dev]

>
> > On Apr 25, 2018, at 12:56 PM, via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > Welcome Anastasis!  I'm very happy to see this work going forward.
> >
> > I see that your first task is to make "debugify" into a function pass,
> > so we will be able to get data on a per-pass basis.  At EuroLLVM there
> > was a relevant lightning talk about a different tool, see:
> > http://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-04/talks.html#Lightning_11
> > It will be extremely interesting to see how well your results line up
> > with the data that Greg was able to gather on how well (or poorly)
> > various passes handled debug info.
>


Absolutely. As I said in my lightning talk at EuroLLVM, I think the two
approaches (debugify vs dexter) will be very nicely complementary to each
other.  Improvements made from analysis of one approach should be
verifiable from the other which I think could be very powerful.  I'm hoping
my tool will be open sourced very very soon (I was disappointed not to have
managed it in time for my talk), but regardless I'll be continuing to add
more test coverage and measure and share results in the meantime.

As the talk video and poster aren't up yet, my quick description of DExTer
is that it automatically drives the debugger to step through some test
code, compares against some set of expectations and uses a simple heuristic
to assign an overall score to the quality of the experience (see
https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37234 for an example of using it to
spot a change in the user debugging experience).

My hope is that by the end of your project we'll be able to show a steady
improvement in the score across a number of examples as a result of your
project and any other work underway at the same time to improve optimized
debugging!  I'll be watching with great interest. Let me know if I can help
at all in any way. Good luck!

-Greg
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