Perhaps the language is too small a vantage point to really get into what’s happening when debugging.
No language will prevent you from misimplementing the specs, but languages can be designed in such a way that it easy to trace back why the button is green and not red.
It seems like those who are the most serious about debugging are from the video game industry. They get all the cool stuff with time travel, hot reload, etc... So much that I expected to see something about video games, and was surprised it wasn't.
And Antithesis is (theoretically) one solution to that, which is very neat!
(I know modern games are also often operating in a distributed environment, but to generalize very broadly, there’s a lot more happening “in one place”)
If the spec is written in the language itself, then some languages certainly will.
See Lean, Rocq, Isabelle, etc
A little bit. The big thing that others are missing is that it's basically impossible for a PL to accomplish this. Antithesis is basically recording all the state including I/O, network I/O, all RNGS (including the OS) and the big one which everyone has trouble with which is time. So basically you don't need to set up your code and how it interfaces with its environment to be deterministic - you can run within a deterministic container instead which flips the problem on its head and makes it much easier. I'm sure there are tradeoffs. A noteable one is how expensive and slow this approach is vs making your code deterministic. But given how basically no one bothers to make their code deterministic and this is a drop-in solution for scenarios like that, it's really worth it. Additionally, unlike approaches like rr which offer similar capabilities, this is even more generic & not dependent on adding support for every OS interface (e.g. rr doesn't support io_uring yet but I believe antithesis would since it's running at the VM level)
I don't know to what degree this is true for other language teams but one thing I've observed is that language designers, compiler people, VM people, and IDE/debugger people have more distinct cultures than you might expect. That can make it hard to ship features that cut across those domains. I think we've gotten a lot better at doing that kind of holistic design on the Dart team, but it took years of team-building to get there.
I sometimes wonder if this sort of determinism is the sort of thing that is either designed in from the start of a system/PL, or you need near-hardware level control (like Antithesis).
(I work at Antithesis, if youre interested in chatting more once this thread has gone cold come join discord.gg/antithesis)