Show HN: Retrace – reverse debugging for production CPython applications

Category: devtools

Tags: reverse-debugging, python, debugger

Score: 7.5/10 (Innovation: 8, Technical: 8, Documentation: 7, Utility: 7)

Retrace is a reverse debugger for production CPython applications, allowing developers to record a failing execution and replay it backward in VS Code to find the root cause. It uniquely captures the boundary between Python code and nondeterministic external calls (network, filesystem, randomness) rather than recording at the syscall level, keeping overhead very low for I/O-bound workloads. This combination of production recording, reverse debugging, and Python-level semantics fills a recognized gap for debugging hard-to-reproduce timing- and state-dependent bugs.

Target audience: backend devs

Repository: https://github.com/retracesoftware/retracesoftware · Python · Apache-2.0 · 1 stars

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