Debugging Support for Reactive Programming

Debugging reactive data-flow-oriented applications is a cumbersome
task. Unfortunately, modern development environments
provide only suitable tools to debug control-floworiented
programs. As a result, software engineers utilizing
RxJS, a popular library for reactive programming in
JavaScript, use inapt debugging tools, utilities outside of
their accustomed IDE, or antiquated debugging practices like
manual print statements. This paper presents two contributions
to reactive debugging: (i) Operator log points, a novel
debugging utility for reactive programming, make manual
print statements obsolete.We implement them for RxJS as an
extension for Microsoft Visual Studio Code. By doing so, we
integrate the utility with the workflow of software engineers
seamlessly, thus (ii) proof the feasibility of a ready-to-hand
debugging utility for reactive programming by existence.