# Debugging the Code

## Debugging the DSP Code

On a computer, doing a computation that is undefined in mathematics (like val/0 of log(-1)), and unrepresentable in floating-point arithmetic, will produce a NaN value, which has a special internal representation. Similarly, some computations will exceed the range that is representable with floating-point arithmetics, and are represented with a special INFINITY value, which value depends of the choosen type (like float, double or long double).

After being produced, those values can actually contaminate the following flow of computations (that is Nan + any value = NaN for instance) up to the point of producing incorrect indexes when used in array access, and causing memory access crashes.

The Faust compiler gives error messages when the written code is not syntactically or semantically correct, and the interval computation system on signals is supposed to detect possible problematic computations at compile time, and refuse to compile the corresponding DSP code. But the interval calculation is currently quite imperfect, can misbehave, and possibly allow problematic code that can even possibly crash at runtime to be generated. The typical case is when producing indexes to access rdtable/rwtable or delay lines, that may trigger memory access crashes.

Several strategies have been developed to help programmers better understand their written DSP code, and possibly analyse it, both at compile time and runtime.

### Debugging at compile time

#### The -ct and -cat options

Using the -ct and -cat compilation options allows to check table index range, by verifying that the actual signal range is compatible with the actual table size. Note that since the interval calculation is imperfect, you may see false positive especially when using recursive signals where the interval calculation system will typically produce [-inf, inf] range, which is not precise enough to correctly describe the real signal range.

#### The -me option

Starting with version 2.37.0, mathematical functions which have a finite domain (like sqrt defined for positive or null values, or asin defined for values in the [-1..1] range) are checked at compile time when they actually compute values at that time, and raise an error if the program tries to compute an out-of-domain value. If those functions appear in the generated code, their domain of use can also be checked (using the interval computation system) and the -me option will display warnings if the domain of use is incorrect. Note that again because of the imperfect interval computation system, false positive may appear and should be checked.

### Debugging at runtime time

#### The interp-tracer tool

The interp-tracer tool runs and instruments the compiled program using the Interpreter backend. Various statistics on the code are collected and displayed while running and/or when closing the application, typically FP_SUBNORMAL, FP_INFINITE and FP_NAN values, or INTEGER_OVERFLOW, CAST_INT_OVERFLOW and DIV_BY_ZERO operations, or LOAD/STORE errors. A more complete documentation is available on the this page.

#### The faust2caqt tool

On macOS, the faust2caqt script has a -me option to catch math computation exceptions (floating point exceptions and integer div-by-zero or overflow, etc.) at runtime. Developers can possibly use the dsp_me_checker class to decorate a given DSP object with the math computation exception handling code.

### Fixing the errors

Those errors have to be then fixed by carefully checking signal range, like verifying the min/max values in vslider/hslider/nentry user-interface items.

Note that the Faust math library contains the implementation of isnan and isinf functions that may help during development.