Reversible Programming Primer: Introduction

Over the past few years, I’ve been doing a lot of personal hobby research into reversible computing. Studying reversible computing has been almost like having to learn programming from the ground up again, and the lack of resources has meant that I have had to come up with my own mental models and analogies for understanding reversible programming concepts. So I thought that it might be worthwhile to share some of that hard-won intuition so that anyone else looking into the topic might have an easier time getting a grip on it. This is the first in a series of posts discussing some of the basic concepts and programming primitives of reversible computing. In this post, I will be explaining what reversible computing is and some high-level concepts of how it can be used for computation.