Omniscient Debugging for C...

[Mike Stump]

On Thursday, June 3, 2004, at 06:39 PM, Bil Lewis wrote:
> I've written a new kind of debugger -- it records state changes
> and allows the programmer to essentially "go backwards in time."

Not very new...  gdb had this years and years ago now (5 years), 
though, maybe in a more limited form.  Not sure what the current state 
is, or if the code ever went into the main sources.  I'd ask over on 
the gdb list.

Ah, found it:

http://sources.redhat.com/gdb/talks/esc-west-1999/

http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/documentation/ has the pointer to 
these...

The main difference appears to be that having the compiler pick things 
to trace would be nice.  The only problem of course would be the size 
of the collected data when used on a real system, instead of a toy 
system.

I can't help but wonder about extending mudflap type stuff to cover the 
case you're interested in and communicating that to gdb.


Oh, and the term I like for all of this is temporal debugging.  Google 
gets a few hits, some of them are kinda related.  I think the gdb list 
is the best place to host such conversations.