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Debugging in the Multiverse

antithesis.com

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Re: Debugging in the Multiverse

#61

It is really interesting to me that this sort of thing didn’t come from programming language folks like I’d expect. You’d think PLs are in the absolute perfect spot to implement things, because they define the semantics and runtime. And there are a few PLs who have time-travel demos, but they’ve never really been seen as more than a cool tech demo. Perhaps the language is too small a vantage point to really get into…

Emm.. so many tools are/were available for C and Java. But yeah, we need to reinvent wheels every so often

All I know of is rr :)

Re: Debugging in the Multiverse

#62

It is really interesting to me that this sort of thing didn’t come from programming language folks like I’d expect. You’d think PLs are in the absolute perfect spot to implement things, because they define the semantics and runtime. And there are a few PLs who have time-travel demos, but they’ve never really been seen as more than a cool tech demo. Perhaps the language is too small a vantage point to really get into…

I know time-travel debugging is very very close to Gilad Bracha's heart and something he was really hoping would make its way into Dart. I don't know to what degree this is true for other language teams but one thing I've observed is that language designers, compiler people, VM people, and IDE/debugger people have more distinct cultures than you might expect. That can make it hard to ship features that cut across tho…

Yeah, I can believe this. I've been working in static analysis for C++ for only 2 years or so, but balancing soundness, precision, and reasonable analysis time really does a number on being more holistic about how to approach these problems. Very much feels like your brain just cannot see other ways to reason about programs because it is so sunk into the current way.

I sometimes wonder if this sort of determinism is the sort of thing that is either designed in from the start of a system/PL, or you need near-hardware level control (like Antithesis).

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