It is a brave company that claims it can slash debugging costs, but that is precisely what Undo Software is saying about its bidirectional debugger, UndoDB.

Undo is a 2005 UK-based start-up that has decided to take the principles of bidirectional debugging already used within the Java community and build a tool that provides the same capabilities for C and C++, which the company claims can often be more prone to bug creation.

The company claims this is particularly useful for finding intermittent bugs, as well as those where the actual cause of a bug is widely separated from its point of actual impact in the code. Such bugs can take a significant amount of time to find and can cost a great deal of money, both in direct developer time and the indirect impact on application delivery into production.

For some developers, however, there is a small drawback to accessing these capabilities at the moment. The initial V1.x release of UndoDB is only for use with C and C++ applications running on Linux-equipped x86 hardware. It cannot yet support applications that use threads, signal handlers or shared memory.

The road map, however, says that Version 2 will support multi-threading and signal handlers, and future versions will target other operating systems, including Windows, Apple's OS X and BSD, and other processor architectures. ®