I don't work for Microsoft and I'm not selling anything.
The point is general. Any time you hear terms like "time travel debugging", you should get excited, because someone out there has worked very hard to make your life easy.
It's just ridiculous how much effort has gone into some of these tools, and then has been ignored. It's a waste that bring tears to my eyes. You have all been given light sabers, and you hit each other with blunt sticks.
I have heard it said[1] that the complexity of our modern government is a consequence of the computerization of its bureaucratic functions. In effect, the complexity of implementing crazily esoteric laws used to regularize how crazily esoteric the laws could be. No more.
If time-traveling debugging becomes table stakes then we will build systems that can only be debugged by time traveling debuggers. Specifically, because we'll lose our healthy fear of complexity beyond what logging and a normal debugger can manage. And that fear (more often called "experience") is about the only thing that causes the greybeards to push the non-greybeards for simple, elegant solutions.
I think we collectively go further, faster without the magic because magic makes us willing to discount complexity.
But I am something of a Luddite.
[1] By my father, a now retired Social Security Administration manager, roughly 1980 to 2015.
They're not ignored, most are just not feasible in production due to both performance and memory overhead. They're still used for tests to check for issues (valgrind?)
If you can point to something that actually works properly in production without much overhead I'd use it in a heartbeat.
Also, I'd say proper logs are a form of time traveling debugging... so a system built on logs might work :)
rr is time travel debugging, but you can't use it in production or running desktop applications normally, since it adds overhead, disables parallelism, and doesn't snapshot so replaying a bug that takes 3 hours to occur takes 3 hours.
Unless they establish that it's a single root system I wouldn't dethrone Pando just yet. From the description it's at least 9 separate seagrass beds, so I doubt it's all one system.
As a side note, I'm going to see Pando this weekend.
Yup. No matter the cause, it’s the end of the world. In my experience the reason is escalation: you make a reasonable case, respondents argue in over-the-top tones, or in bad faith. Easy to escalate in turn. Eventually it’s impossible to have a moderate opinion, relayed in good faith, and hope to have any effect whatsoever.
