Show HN: CodeTracer – A time-traveling debugger implemented in Nim and Rust

Hey!

We are presenting CodeTracer - a user-friendly time-traveling debugger designed to support a wide range of programming languages:

https://github.com/metacraft-labs/codetracer?tab=readme-ov-f...

CodeTracer records the execution of a program into a sharable self-contained trace file. You can load the produced trace files in a GUI environment that allows you to move forward and backward through the execution and to examine the history of all memory locations. They say a picture is worth a thousand words — well, a video is even better! Watch the demo below to see CodeTracer in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZsJ55JVqmU

The initial release is limited to the Noir programming language, but CodeTracer uses an open format for its trace files and we've started community-driven projects which aim to add support for Ruby and Python.

We are also developing an alternative back-end, capable of working with RR recordings, which will make CodeTracer suitable for debugging large-scale programs in a variety of system programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Nim, D, Zig, Go, Fortran and FreePascal.

Show HN: CodeTracer – A time-traveling debugger implemented in Nim and Rust
github.com

Looks really cool, but in production systems, won't the trace files proliferate at extreme speed? How would you correlate the files to a certain session for user identification for example?

I love it, I always wished for something like that. Will try to later test with python. Wish there was also for JS/TS. As for rr debugger did it got by now any support for MacOS or Windows or Android? I'm also wondering how heavy are those recording for typical apps.

This would be also great for LLM to give some context via MCP server or even let LLM pick what variables history wanna see instead of giving full recording file.

Also nice would be some recording filtering that you wanna e.g. pick few variables and display history during whole execution maybe with some specific formating and maybe even for some numeric variables or like tensors, images, etc pass to rerun for visual debugging so you can see plot it

Noir is a Domain Specific Language for SNARK proving systems. https://noir-lang.org/