Any real world experience debugging a production functional program?

Question

I\'m interested in what tools and methods are used for diagnosing flaws in large scale functional programs. What tools are useful? My current understanding is that \'printf\'

Answer 1

My current job is to implement new features and support a large system implemented in ocaml and C#. Most of the "logic" is implemented in caml and the GUI and data access is in C#. The debugging techniques are pretty much as you describe lots of logging and assert to work out what's gone wrong.

Additionally we have a large number of unit tests, which are just caml scripts for testing the logic and help to spot any regression errors.

We also use continuous integration to check the build and run nightly test scripts, including some automated testing of the GUI though our "automation" style scripting interface.

I quite often use the C# debugger for debugging the C# portion of the application, the ocaml debugger does yet work under windows so we don't use it. Although we hope one day we may fix this but it isn't top of our priority list. I have occasionally used windbg to investigate managed and unmanaged memory problems, though this turned out to be caused by a third party component implemented in C#.

So overall, nothing out of the ordinary but it seems to work okay, we don't see too many production problems.

Thanks, Rob