Supporting the debugging of Erlang programs by symbolic execution

Abstract

Programmers can benefit from static source code analysis techniques in various ways: they can understand their code better, test it more effectively, debug it more efficiently, and so on. However, they often face the challenge of discovering how to reproduce faulty executions that cause runtime errors. The term symbolic execution refers to a static source code analysis method that can help with this challenge. In this paper, we are showing a symbolic execution-based analysis method to find the source of a runtime error. The method uses a control-flow graph to select the execution paths reaching the targeted runtime error. The algorithm is implemented as part of the RefactorErl static program analysis and transformation framework.

Keywords

• static analysis
• fault localization
• symbolic execution
• erlang