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A truly "next generation debugger" as replacement for gdb, lldb and the MSVC debugger which allows me to watch my program working in realtime (and pause/step/rewind at any time). Visualization should include things like a memory-read/write/execute heatmaps, a realtime flame-graph profiler, a data structure browser which "knows" the entire program state, and a much tighter integration of such a debugger into the regular edit-compile-test workflow.

As it is now, debugging is still stuck in the 20th century (I realize that the "realtime part" is hard to do, and may require to get the compiler and even hardware peeps on board too).




If you are doing web development have a look at http://replay.io


Building something like this to work with existing code in compiled languages is REALLY HARD. However, take a look at rr and Pernos.co.


Yep, I'm aware of both projects, also RemedyBG is a step in the right direction.

I agree it's hard, but it's been hard for the last 3 decades, but not much has happened (with the exception of time travel debugging).

I think debugging tools are just not deemed important enough by many programmers, which is a bit of a shame. Also they require support from compilers, operating systems, and hardware, and this level of integration is hard to achieve - maybe Apple could do it if they had any interest in good debugging tools.


This is called time travel debugging right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_debugging


It's one step in the right direction, but as far as I'm aware it's still too awkward to use (e.g. AFAIK it requires a separate recording and debugging session), ideally I should just be able to hit the "Run" button in my IDE, and have "time slider controls" which allow me to pause and rewind on the fly, while seeing the visualized program state update.




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