{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/debugging-backwards-in-time","title":"Debugging Backwards in Time","arxiv_id":"cs/0310016","date":"2003-10-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Bil Lewis"],"abstract":"By recording every state change in the run of a program, it is possible to present the programmer every bit of information that might be desired. Essentially, it becomes possible to debug the program by going ``backwards in time,'' vastly simplifying the process of debugging. An implementation of this idea, the ``Omniscient Debugger,'' is used to demonstrate its viability and has been used successfully on a number of large programs. Integration with an event analysis engine for searching and control is presented. Several small-scale user studies provide encouraging results. Finally performance issues and implementation are discussed along with possible optimizations. This paper makes three contributions of interest: the concept and technique of ``going backwards in time,'' the GUI which presents a global view of the program state and has a formal notion of ``navigation through time,'' and the integration with an event analyzer.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0310016v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0310016v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"debugging-backwards-in-time","repo_url":"https://github.com/cybertronai/gradient-checkpointing","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"paper_slug":"debugging-backwards-in-time","repo_url":"https://github.com/openai/gradient-checkpointing","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}