Hindsight: Reversible Computing

One of the more interesting tech pieces that came out this week has been Hindsight [PDF]. Hindsight is made by Virtutech and is billed as the "the first complete, general-purpose tool for reverse execution and debugging of arbitrary electronic systems." The demos were received extremely well and it just looks cool.

!tsop tsrif

[destinedforgreatness]

cheap joke. sorry.

better be

[promantek]

20/20 ... *ducks a tomato* i'll be here all week

Wow !

[Digital Warfare]

Now when I'm playing online, when I die I can rewind.

I can hear it now, "Godlike!"

BSOL?

[bunyip]

So, would reversible computing let me have a Blue Screen Of Life?

That would be so cool...

Alan.

The trick...

[Professor S. Brown]

If you read the article carefully, it does actually say. Basically they've optimised the printf() and scanf() functions, from the standard C libraries, to a very high degree. Using these optimised functions allows them to literally run the processor backwards, with a little help from Euler Integration to approximate the execution path. Its very clever indeed.

Thats simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

just invert the micro clock signal so everything runs backwards :)

Re:But what about external events

[LiquidCoooled]

No, you got it all wrong.

This product is a cleverly disguised time machine.
You can actually rollback and reverse to actually see the initial "First post!" remark, and undo the slashdot effect.

If you look closely, you can also see the cognative response from Hemos as he clicked Accept on this submission.

Hmm...

[thed00d]

Interesting, but will it work on a dead badger [strangehorizons.com] running GNU/Linux? Cause thats where do all my development work.

Re:!tsop tsrif

[gorjusborg]

C'mon, this is funny!

It's friday people, lighten up :)

Last Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Last Post

Come from?

[AJWM]

Reverse execution? Are we finally going to see an implementation of the COME FROM [fortran.com] statement?

(See also the entry in the jargon file [catb.org].)

From the website...

[ghost1911]

This is especially significant when you consider 50% of a software engineer's time is spent debugging software.

They assume that programmers... DEBUG! Hah!

What, me lose brain cells?

[Anonymous Coward]

or you are writing a long document in a word processor, and you make a spelling error and you have to start from the beginning;

That would be redicoulas.

That would be redickulos.

That would be ridikyulus.

That would be funny!

Re:Come from?

[Tablizer]

Personally, I like Evangelical Fortran. It has a GOTO HELL statement.