In this final part of my series on the history of reverse debugging I will look at the products that launched around the mid-2000s and that finally made reverse debugging available in a commercially packaged product and not just research prototypes. Part one of this series provided a background on the technology and part two discussed various research papers on the topic going back to the early 1970s. The first commercial product featuring reverse debugging was launched in 2003, and then there have been a steady trickle of new products up until today.
Post updated 2012-09-28 with a revised history.
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One thing that surprises me is how rare the feature of checkpointing or snapshotting is in the land of virtual platforms, despite the obvious benefits of that feature. Indeed, checkpointing was one of the first cool things demonstrated to me when I joined Virtutech back in 2002. Today, I could not ever imagine doing without it. Not having checkpointing is like having a word processor where you only get to save once, when your document is finished, with no option of saving intermediate states.