[akamoonknight]

Being a person who works with FPGAs. For all their difficulties, waveforms of both simulation and real-time tapping capabilities are indispensable for tracking what happens before, during, and after an erroneous event occurs. One thing I always miss when going back to software development is some sort of 'waveform' of what the process has done over time and tracking the state of the system over that same course of time. Admittedly dealing with CPU instructions and a program's function calls and overlapping threads is orders of magnitude more difficult than tracking how a bit is changing in a waveform over time, but it definitely seems like tools are getting closer and closer to something that's equivalent and that's pretty awesome to see.

[Sirened]

Ha, this was my experience as well when getting into hardware after spending forever in software. It's SO amazing being able to just shoot a program through simulation and then look at the waveform to see how an instruction propagates down a pipeline. Debugging concurrency issues on hardware (i.e. incorrect re-ordering/concurrent scheduling) is honestly so much easier than debugging software concurrency because you often can't even see the entire system state. We're starting to see software catch up with things like time-travel debug with instruction tracing (whether Intel Processor Trace or ARM CoreSight tracing) but the analysis tools for these sorts of things have nothing on wave analysis programs. They either force you into a linear interface (GDB time travel) which makes actually finding the issue a pain in the ass or they simply don't give you the granularity of data that you need.