[Tloewald]

I believe Visual Studio does this by simply rewinding to the function entry point which addresses most of the concerns you've raised. A debugger is just an aid to reasoning about your code, not a substitute for it.

You might make the same argument against unit tests, or little hacks you write to separate out a problematic piece of code from an even more complicated context.

[nitrogen]

I believe Visual Studio does this by simply rewinding to the function entry point which addresses most of the concerns you've raised.

Live recompilation in Java (at least in Eclipse) behaves basically the same way.