Program slicing is one of those software technologies where there is much more activity in the research community than in the industry community. Does anybody outside of the research community using slicing tools on production code to help with debugging or other tasks? If so, what tools did you use?
Any success stories about using slicing tools to help debugging
debugging
The following Chrome screenshot shows the trace output from an XSLT 2.0 processor running in the browser:The XSLT program is 'sliced' so every instruction records in the trace output when it was executed. The nesting of the output XML explains the execution hierarchy.The above sample helps show the actual template that was executed as a result of the xsl:apply-templates instruction. Thus the trace shows the same information that you would get from an IDE debugger - but without having to step through each line of code.If an exception is thrown within the executing code, then the trace terminates at that point, showing exactly where the code failed, providing more information that a typical call-stack.Also, additional trace instructions can be embedded in the XSLT (in the form of a fn:trace function call) to provide extra diagnostics for a specific part of the code.