wwilson

That's true. And it's also true that investing heavily would take time, and the more time goes on the less likely we are to be acquired or disappear (or for the acquisition to be by somebody…

Your understanding of our approach is pretty much correct. As for interesting coverage metrics... stay tuned! We're going to write about this a lot in the future!

Yes, we are working on integrated debugging technology (what our customers mostly do these days is just run a conventional debugger inside the simulation, but that doesn't quite use our full powe…

I will let Dave and Nick chime in here if they want to, since they saw the Apple acquisition closer up than I did, but here are my views: (1) Your beliefs about what happened to FoundationDB's cu…

Database vendors are very natural customers, because they're distributed systems for whom correctness and uptime are paramount. But they're far from our only customers! We have tons of peopl…

To be clear — many of us worked at FoundationDB, and we were certainly inspired by the testing technology we had there. But Antithesis is built from scratch, and WAY more general and WAY more powerful…

Thanks! But just you wait… the really insane stuff isn’t even public yet!

Antithesis co-founder here -- happy to answer any questions about the company, the technology, or this particular engagement!

Alex discusses this in the post. Performance counters were the first thing we tried, but alas they're non-deterministic about every one-in-a-trillion instructions.

You're sort of right, but we're actually sort of both. We use determinism to do controlled fault-injection and to explore your program's state space, but we can also use it for very p…

What do you mean by a dead giveaway to malware? We're allowed to lie to the guest OS about how many CPUs there are!

You are correct. There's a set of concurrency bugs that require actual SMP setups to trigger (like stuff with atomic operations, memory ordering, etc.). If you're trying to build a very low-…

You are exactly correct. Our hypervisor grants you this power (and then we use the power to explore as many possible values of var_1 and var_2 as we can, in case some of them trigger a concurrency bug…

We provide a bunch of different ways for you to express your test properties. (1) A lot of stuff we can detect automatically, like crashes, OOMs, etc. (2) You should turn on assertions in all the code…

Bitflips are an interesting form of fault-injection that we could add: https://antithesis.com/docs/applications/reliability/fault_i... If you know somebody who will pay…

A lot of us worked at FoundationDB, but this is a new company (Antithesis) which develops autonomous testing and debugging tools.

With most of our customers, they don't actually have to change their build system at all. We take their normal CI products, plus a small amount of special configuration, and run them. This is act…

We are not only aware of RR, we've had extensive conversations with Rob and Kyle! Big fans of their work at Pernosco.

As of now, we do not have the technical capability to deterministically virtualize a GPU. This is an area of interest for us, however. Anybody interested in helping with this should reach out!

Somebody once suggested to me that this could be very hand for the reproducible builds folks. I'm sure that now that we're out in the open, lots of people will suggest great applications for…

Nope. We’re emulating a deterministic computer, so your software can’t act nondeterministically if it tries.

We can force any* software to be deterministic. * Offer only good for x86-64 software that runs on Linux whose dependencies you can install locally or mock. The first two restrictions we will probably…

Aww... crap, you're right. I knew we should have finished the UI testing product and run it on ourselves before launching. Disclosure: Antithesis co-founder.

Thanks for your kind words! As I mention in this comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39358526 ) we are planning to have pricing suitable for small teams, and perhaps even a f…

Let's do it.

Post author here. Sorry it was vague, but there's only so much detail you can go into in a blog post aimed at general audiences. Our documentation ( https://antithesis.com/docs…

TigerBeetle is actually another customer of ours. You might ask why, given that they have their own, very sophisticated simulation testing. The answer is that they're so fanatical about correctne…