Rapita announces a backward step in debugging

York, UK, 22nd March 2010 Rapita Systems will be demonstrating Rewind, an innovative debug support feature for RapiTime, at the Avionics Conference and Exhibition in Amsterdam, March 24th-25th 2010. This technology will allow developers to follow execution forwards and backwards through recorded traces of embedded real-time applications. RapiTime currently collects traces from embedded, real-time applications to determine code coverage, measure timing behaviour, assess worst-case execution time and direct optimization effort. The Rewind feature also uses these execution traces to provide debugger-like functionality. Like a debugger, Rewind allows developers to step though functions, step over functions, return to the caller of a function and run to a break point. Unlike a regular debugger, it’s possible to perform these activities forwards or backwards from any given point in the execution. “Rewind brings a complete new capability to RapiTime users” stated Dr Andrew Coombes, Marketing Manager. “Frequently embedded developers face the situation where the target just stops working – Rewind helps those developers to identify the cause, by stepping backwards from the point where the application stopped to see the sequence of events leading up to the problem.” Coombes continued “in addition to this, it also allows users to review the execution paths that resulted in specific execution times. This means users are able to answer questions such as ‘why did it take so long to run on the 435th execution?’” Rapita Systems will be demonstrating RapiTime Rewind at stand E21 of the Avionics 2010 Exhibition and Conference. They will also be exhibiting their new zero overhead instrumentation technology, and will be giving a tutorial entitled “Software performance optimization: How to avoid early obsolescence in avionics systems” RapiTime Rewind will be featured in the v2.3 release of RapiTime, due in May 2010. The concepts underlying RapiTime Rewind were developed in conjunction with ALL-TIMES, a research project funded by the 7th European Framework Programme (FP7) under contract no 215068. More information can be found at http://www.all-times.org/