SBE VS rr

I was about to suggest Chronicle, but it looks like they have gone closed-source. The older version is still interesting to look through though. Aeron / Disruptor / SBE are good projects for inspiration as well.

Could you evaluate how it compares with SBE?

SBE

Consider a valid protobuf message with such a field. If you can locate the field value bytes, you can write a new value to the same location without breaking the message. It's obviously possible to the same with the varint type too, as long as you don't change the number of bytes - not so practical, but useful for enum field which has a limited set of useful values (usually less than 128).

Pregenerating protobuf messages you want to send and then modifying the bytes in-place before sending is going to give you a nice performance boost over "normal" protobuf serialization. It can be useful if you need to be protobuf compatible, but it's obviously better to use something like SBE - https://github.com/real-logic/simple-binary-encoding

https://rr-project.org/ had the same problem. They use the retired conditional branch counter instead of instruction counter, and then instruction steeping until at the correct address.

That'll work great for your Distributed QSort Incorporated startup, where the only product is a sorting algorithm.

Formal software verification is very useful. But what can be usefully formalized is rather limited, and what can be formalized correctly in practice is even more limited. That means you need to restrict your scope to something sane and useful. As a result, in the real world running thousands of tests is practically useful. (Well, it depends on what those tests are; it's easy to write 1000s of tests that either test the same thing, or only test the things that will pass and not the things that would fail.) They are especially useful if running in a mode where the unexpected happens often, as it sounds like this system can do. (It's reminiscent of rr's chaos mode -- https://rr-project.org/ linking to https://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/02/introducing-rr-chaos-mo... )

The approach of check-pointing computation such that it is resumable and restartable sounds similar to a time-traveling debugger, like rr or WinDbg:

https://rr-project.org/

https://learn.microsoft.com/windows-hardware/drivers/debugge...

https://rr-project.org

This is indeed a problem people have with debuggers, so some very smart people found a way to fix it.

...and you're not on Linux, because on Linux we have rr! https://rr-project.org/

(I still use print statements 99.99% of the time though)

https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr?tab=readme-ov-file#system-...

> I've heard Linux support was down to like one guy [...]

Linux support is down to you. It's down to all of us. Install rr (https://rr-project.org/) and capture a crash with it.

Then you can replay the crash, find out that it's actually crashing in your closed-source graphics driver, which will motivate you to switch to an open source driver and fix your issue.

Also, while you're at it, update your linux kernel and wayland. They've both had bugs that could manifest as random firefox crashes in the last several months.

I imagine you are referring to https://rr-project.org/ ?

Had never heard of it, looks pretty amazing, I might actually enjoy debugging now!