Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging

Last year, I did a Simics webinar which included a two-part demo of how to use Simics to debug an endianness bug in a networked system as it migrates from big-endian to a little-endian system. Along the way, I also showed off various Simics features like reverse execution and checkpointing and scripted execution.

The demo is now online at the Wind River Youtube channel, and the setup is explained in a blog post at the Wind River company blog which is worth reading before watching the video.

Programming like Lego

LEGOs seem to be a favorite analogy for people bemoaning the state of software development today. “If only it would be as simple as putting Legos together” is a common enough statement, along with various proposals to make software that is Lego-like. Sometime, I wonder if people making these statements have actually tried to build anything non-trivial from Lego recently. Here, I will look a bit closer at the Lego-programming analogy. There is indeed quite a lot to it, but it is not all about child-level simplicity. I think there are some good lessons that can be learnt from analogizing Lego and programming.

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