From the standpoint of a debugger, there is a global state, which sums up the entire global context of an applications run state.
This state, I assume, could be assessed or accumulated into in a single file, which itself could be summarized as single checksum, at any point in time.
Therefore, a debugger based step by step global checksum could be used to easily find where a program differs from where it used to operate, in comparison to where it currently operates, given of course the exact same inputs.
Does this exist in any development environment, or as a library/RFC that could be used cross language?
In my particular case, I'm porting an app from VB6 to C#, and am constantly walking the code in both environments to find where my port is broken. It seems to me that if there were some library that existed that could, in debug mode, store the above detailed checksum, on a step by step basis, then I could easily find where my port was broken without having to step through line by line by line.
Thanks for any suggestions!
It seems to me like you'd need to have a per language implementation of this library that wrote data out in a consistent format.
for example, in C#, you might have data in a List in javascript, you might have it in an array.
These 2 structures are different, and couldn't be written out the same way without a lib managing this process.
Is it doable? I think so. But I don't know of any library to do so. Interesting idea!