[CJefferson]

This looks cool.

Personally I'd also be interested in this for academic work -- anything which makes it easier to be sure an experiment can be reproduced later (a week, year, or decade later, in increasing order of difficulty), is good to have.

[rrnewton]

Yes, I'm very interested in that as well. I've been involved with the ACM Artifact Evaluation process which has been going on in several conferences for a while.

https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/artifact-review-ba...

But it's been pretty frustrating. As an author, my PLDI 2014 artifact stopped working less than 5 years later (Docker image binary incompatibility). And when I was co-chair of an Artifact Evaluation Committee in 2017, there was not great reproducibilty of the artifacts that were submitted either.

If you package a VM (freezing the Linux kernel), and are pretty sure that VM will run in 10 years, PLUS you determinize the execution itself... that should allow durable bitwise reproducibility. Maybe Hermit could be one ingredient of that.

For scientific reproducibility, there is a lot of other tooling to build too, and I know some folks have been working in that area:

https://ctuning.org/