Debugging and diagnostics tasks are a time-consuming, often frustrating, aspect of software development and can be particularly difficult when they involve non-deterministic application behavior. To improve the debugging process we have been working with the Chakra JavaScript team at Microsoft on application record/replay and time-travel debugging technologies. This talk will cover the core innovations from our research on ultra-low overhead record/replay of JavaScript (Node.js) applications. Using this core record/replay technology we will show how we constructed a time-travel debugger in the cross-platform Visual Studio Code IDE which supports both local debugging and offline debugging of failures from cloud deployed applications. These tools eliminate or simplify many tedious aspects of the debugging process and are an enabling technology for our ongoing work on tools to improve on, assist with, or completely automate, various parts of the diagnostics workflow.

Mark Marron is passionate about programming language & software engineering research. His recent focus has been on bringing innovative ideas from the research community into practical tools for Node.js developers and he is leading work on low-overhead diagnostic tracing and time-travel debugging tools at Microsoft Research.