Tools such as debuggers for high performance language implementations are usually expensive in development time, as well as runtime overhead. Truffle’s Instrumentation Framework addresses both problems. It provides API access to internal execution state with near zero runtime overhead, and comes with tools, for example a “Debug Engine”, that require only a few language-specific “adapters” to be functional.

Michael Van De Vanter is a researcher at Oracle Labs in Redwood Shores, CA. His current project is to ensure that the high-performance language implementations made possible by the Truffle/Graal platform are accompanied by tools, such as debuggers, profilers, and others, with minimal extra development effort. He was previously author of the Maxine Inspector, a combination debugger and visual heap inspector for the Maxine Research VM, and before that Principal Investigator of the Jackpot project at Sun Microsystems Labs.