News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: CodeTracer – A new time-traveling debugger imple... by cxie on Thursday March 06, 2025 @11:03AM (#43281723)
The Noir support makes sense given its use in ZK proofs where execution tracing is particularly valuable, but I'm really looking forward to the Python and Ruby implementations. Those languages' dynamic nature makes bugs particularly elusive sometimes.

Has anyone here tried using this with Noir yet? I'm curious about the performance overhead of the tracing mechanism, especially for longer-running programs. Also wondering if there are plans to support JavaScript/TypeScript for web development use cases.

Re:Show HN: CodeTracer – A new time-traveling debugger imple... by cxie on Thursday March 06, 2025 @11:19AM (#43281915)
The planned RR recordings integration is what I'm most excited about though. Having this capability for systems languages like Rust and C++ would be transformative for complex debugging scenarios where you're often forced to restart debugging sessions from scratch after stepping past a crucial point.
Re:Show HN: CodeTracer – A new time-traveling debugger imple... by Apofis on Thursday March 06, 2025 @11:52AM (#43282337)
This happens all the time and is super irksome. Being able to step backwards as well as forwards is super cool. Also, being able to do that with a loop using a slider is cool.
Re:Show HN: CodeTracer – A new time-traveling debugger imple... by cxie on Thursday March 06, 2025 @12:27PM (#43282758)
I need a VSCode extension for this. But alas, it's just sitting in their roadmap... Typical. Guess I'll have to roll up my sleeves and build one myself. Not like I have enough on my plate already. At least their trace files are in an open format, so it shouldn't be impossible to hook into the VS Code debugging API.
Re:Show HN: CodeTracer – A new time-traveling debugger imple... by alehander42 on Thursday March 06, 2025 @12:44PM (#43282948)
We'd love additional contributors! We also have some more detailed plans for such an extension. If you're interested in chatting about it, you can join our discord[1] (or we can expand here/in a github issue as well)

1: https://discord.com/invite/aH5WTMnKHT

Re:Show HN: CodeTracer – A new time-traveling debugger imple... by alehander42 on Thursday March 06, 2025 @03:08PM (#43284582)
the support for system languages (the rr integration "backend") is currently closed source.

It's not ready yet, and it might be proprietary: it would be great if we can open source it, if we find a sustainable business model for that