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Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
Debugging Back to the Future
Raise your hand if you’ve ever driven yourself to the brink of insanity hunting down a bug. OK. You can put your hands down! Been there, done that. Debugging can be one of the trickiest, most time consuming tasks of any developer’s job. To track down a defect, you must be able to reproduce the error on demand, reconstruct the chain of events that led to the error, and backtrack along that path to find and fix the bug’s root cause. Some programming languages make this process easy. For example, if you’re working in an “archaic” language such as C or C++, you may be jealous of some of the tools available to Java developers.
But that’s old news now, thanks to Undo Software’s (
http://undo-software.com/)
UndoDB, a
bidirectional debugger for
Linux. UndoDB allows you to step both forward and backward through an application, a previously difficult undertaking for compiled languages. According to its
man page, “undodb is a wrapper for
gdb that allows[ the
GNU Dbugger] to interface with the UndoDB reverse-execution engine. It adds some user-defined commands to gdb that allow a program to be stepped backwards as well as forwards.”
Using UndoDB, you can find a bug quickly, repeat it several times without rerunning the application from scratch, and fix it, all in record time.
