[prewett]

I remember VMS on the VAX did this, it was a major pain in the neck, it was really easy to run out of disk space (although the quota on my account was 1 MB, which was somewhat small even in those days). But consider if this is really what you want. Every habitual save is another version. Every recompile duplicates all the intermediate object files. If you are using Unix and you have /tmp mounted on a versioned file system, every piped command like less or sort will create a new file. If your system uses pagefiles instead of a swap partition (e.g. macOS, Windows), that's going to be really unpleasant.

I've been developing for many years and I can't remember the last time I ran into this problem, so you can try my approach. When I'm debugging something and unsure of my solution, I comment out the original code and put the potential replacement below. If that doesn't work, do the same. I'll sometimes have three or four potential versions. Also, I generally commit every time a task is finished. During development the tasks might be pretty granular ("implemented underlines, strikethroughs, and custom fg/bg colors for text"), but each bug fix gets its own commit ("bug-2309: text was offset incorrectly on Win32"). Between these two, I rarely run into the problem.