[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.