Mercury: Properties and Design of a Remote Debugging Solution using Reflection

Remote debugging facilities are a technical necessity for devices that have limited computing power to run an IDE (e.g., smartphones), lack appropriate input/output interfaces (display, keyboard, mouse) for programming (e.g mobile robots) or are simply unreachable for local development (e.g cloud-servers). Yet remote debugging solutions can prove awkward to use due to their distributed nature. Empirical studies show us that on average 10.5 minutes per coding hour (over five 40-hour work weeks per year) are spend for re-deploying applications while fixing bugs or improving functionality. Moreover current solutions lack facilities that would otherwise be available in a local setting because its difficult to reproduce them remotely. Our work identifies three desirable properties that an ideal solution for remote debugging should exhibit, namely: run-time evolution, semantic instrumentation and adaptable distribution. Given these properties we propose and validate Mercury, a live remote debugging model and architecture for reflective OO languages.