Armin Rigo is a freelance developer. He is one of the founders and lead developers of the PyPy project, which began in 2003. He has taken part in all areas, including the garbage collector and the tracing just-in-time compiler, the STM subsystem, and "side projects" like CFFI and RevDB.
Accepted Talks:
RevDB is an experimental "reverse debugger" for Python, similar to UndoDB-GDB or LL for C. You run your program once, in "record" mode, producing a log file; once you get buggy behavior, you start the reverse-debugger on the log file. It gives an (improved) pdb-like experience, but it is replaying your program exactly as it ran---all input/outputs are replayed from the log file instead of being redone.
The main point is that you can then go backward as well as forward in time: from a situation that looks really buggy you can go back and discover how it came to be. You also get "watchpoints", which are very useful to find when things change. Watchpoints work both forward and backward.
I will show on small examples how you can use it, and also give an idea about how it works. It is based on PyPy, not CPython, so you need to ensure your program works on PyPy in the first place (but chances are that it does).
