This paper claims to do pretty much what in circuit emulator can with no hardware support: https://www.scribd.com/document/323615399/Issta-2016-Zop What's the difference between this and an in circuit emulator or a debugger? Would anyone buy this if it actually worked? What would they use it for?

 

Profiler only measures time. How fast certain pieces of code can be executed. The piper tries to replace the profiler, but I don't think this is a viable approach.

Emulator creates a physical model of the device, but with various hooks, so that you can profile, get an execution trace, step through the code, watch or modify the variables etc.

Debugger uses a real device. The device must have capabilities. Generally, it waits for certain conditions and as soon as they're met (e.g. execution reached a point, or a variable has changed in certain way), it halts the execution. Once halted, you can observe the variables, step through etc.

 

This paper claims to do pretty much what in circuit emulator can with no hardware support

what the paper claims to do can be quite different from what you think the paper claims to do.