Compare to chrome://tracing
https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/trace-event-prof...
I am not sure if trace visualizers were invented 20 years ago for the original time travel debuggers, but they have certainly been used for time travel debugging visualization since at least 20 years ago.
As the page reads, it is a time traveling debugger. You can jump back and forth between different snapshots of time during the execution of your program. It's neat because for compiled languages like rust doing something like this is more advanced.
You click a point in the trace, you jump to that point in time. That has been the standard integration for decades.
The tech industry is getting stupider and hype-ier as it implodes.
- Bash script from Internet requiring sudo, no way
- VSCode plugin? I don't use VSCode. I'm not switching from Zed (literally built in Rust for Rust development)
Help me out, what can I do to try this?
I don't see that VSCode is required, they have a section dedicated to CLI usage https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust#firedbg-command-li... and even the "firedbg open" seems to just be a convenience method for file globbing https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust/blob/1.81.0/comman...
I'm a little with you that it is sus that they don't seem to have any .ts nor package.json file in that repo which would allow one to (a) see what the extension does (b) build the .vsix themselves
On mobile (Firefox on iOS) why does this site keep putting animations in my face?
I can't see this approach working for very long. Tracing at the binary level, whether you do it as RR does with performance counting or whether you do it via instrumentation like Undo and iDNA, works for the general case because it records execution at the lowest level available to a process and therefore captures everything, without special cases.
If these guys want to make a fancy time travel debugger data explorer, that's great. They could in principle make one on top of existing tracing technology without having to simultaneously reinvent both the debugger core and the GUI.
The "time travel debugger" solution they use automatically sets numerous breakpoints and then records a tiny, useless fraction of the information needed to actually recreate past state, but is almost certainly slower than any actual, fully-functional time travel debugger by multiple orders of magnitude. That was the same technique used by the built-in gdb "reverse debugging" which, at least historically, resulted in 1,000x-10,000x (yes, really) slowdown compared to modern techniques which are on the order of 2x-10x. And to at least give gdb some credit, gdb reverse debugging was at least a complete time travel debugger since it recorded everything; it was just unusably slow. That is more than can be said about whatever this is. They would be significantly better off in both functionality and performance wrapping literally any other actual time travel debugger solution.
Then we add on their awful, bespoke trace viewer. I originally just chalked it up to them being unaware of standard practices since most people are unfamiliar with time travel debugging and the associated tooling and they just wanted to show off what they did with some bluster. That is excusable, if somewhat unfortunate. But this is the metaphorical equivalent of claiming you have solved the problem of inserting screws because you invented the hammer which is much better at hammering in screws than a brick.
Their marketing statements are unacceptable misrepresentations of their capabilities with respect to commonly-accepted meanings.
It is utterly baffling that this is more popular than the recent UndoDB thread [1]. They have a real time travel debugger and have been doing it for like 15-20 years. They are actual veterans doing quality engineering.
Is it like just a trace viewer fed data by debugger-style mechanisms?
https://firedbg.sea-ql.org/blog/2023-12-11-architecture-of-f...
Also, there’s usually some language (and compiler) specific garbage that makes the dwarf hard to use and requires special treatment.
anyone know the tool name??? I know it exist but forget it while ago
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/p...
Rust really embodies this imo. I think it will be a few more years, but we're going to be seeing a lot more Rust -- and for good reason.
waschl•1d ago