I did grad school in computer architecture and did a lot of cycle-level debugging in simulators, and I agree this mode of debugging is very very useful. I thin

I did grad school in computer architecture and did a lot of cycle-level debugging in simulators, and I agree this mode of debugging is very very useful. I think that the closest analogue to a waveform view in software may actually be printf()/log-based debugging, in the sense that there's a sort of temporal vs. spatial tradeoff going on: with waveform views or logs (temporal view), you see only the signals/data you've chosen to post, but you can easily see sequences through time, which is useful for many sorts of systems. With a traditional debugger (spatial), you can poke around in memory arbitrarily at a breakpoint, but it's more difficult to see time (you have to explicitly step forward, and usually can't back up). Both are useful.