[Crinus]

> As far as I know, the only way to fix this situation is by building tools so much better than the free tools that the absurdity of refusing to pay for them is overwhelming, and expectations shift.

This of course will only work for a little while until someone who has more time than money (or is a big company that wants to commoditize the tool) will build a command-line version of it on Linux. Weird UX and the need for a spaghetti of shell scripts to integrate with vim/emacs/vscode/sublime/ed will soon follow with an Eclipse addon that nobody will use a bit later. After a macOS port, assuming these are still a thing, Apple may create a nice looking UI and integrate it with Xcode or someone like Panic may create a good front end and sell it for ~$99.

Most people will keep using Windows, think Visual Studio has the best debugger and everyone will be happy.

Those that learn about the "overwhelmingly better approach" will consider the free one the best one and its spaghetti of shell scripts approach the obvious best approach, because they wont have any real deep experience with the paid tools (either the original one or the macOS shiny wrapper - which will be considered as unnecessary by most anyway) to properly judge.

[roca]

Yeah, nah. I sympathize with your point of view, but implementing Pernosco requires some serious science. If you try building a database of all memory and register changes in a naive way, it isn't going to work at all for nontrivial programs. Of course it could be cloned, but you would need a very good team and a lot of work.

Also either you start with rr as a base, in which case you need people with deep rr knowledge, and I know their names, or you build or buy your own record and replay framework --- more time and money.

[souprock]

It's no longer likely at all, but some years ago my workplace nearly open sourced a serious tool. That would have been big news, with the sudden availability of source for a tool that does rr-like stuff.

Some other company could do it. Remember that we've gotten Navigator (now Firefox), Blender, OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, and the .net stuff. Governments can surprise us as well; the USA did that with Ghidra.

I'm not expecting it anytime soon, but surprises happen.

[roca]

That's a possibility, but I don't know of any closed-source tool that does what Pernosco does. Tetrane is the closest I know of, but they aren't as scalable as Pernosco (they don't need to be).

Certainly possible that someone has a secret tool that's as good or better. However, I expect the secret tools in this space are all focused on so-called 'security research', i.e. more like Tetrane and targeted at adversaries of the software under test, rather than its developers, which leads to a somewhat different feature set.

[Crinus]

That sounds to me like saying nobody will ever make a new C++ compiler because C++ is hard and good compilers are hard - before Clang.