I am a big fan of Julia as a programming language, but the lack of a decent debugger keeps turning me away every time I seriously consider changing to it. Now last time I tested the debugging environment out was last summer, and I haven’t really done anything with Julia since or kept up on any pote…

Please please please don’t go there again. There has already been huge threads of people talking past each other, with one side saying (I’m caricaturing) debuggers are for people who don’t know how to code and the other side saying that julia has to have a state-of-the-art debugger or “nobody will u…

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that we already HAVE Julia debuggers. Not just one, several! Are they perfect? No. But they are already useful.

Several debuggers already exist, with most of the features you expect from a modern debugger, yet with some weaknesses. There is active, though long-term, work going on to improve them. There are alternative workflows and programming styles well-suited to the Julia language that alleviate some (but…

[image] DNF: There are alternative workflows and programming styles well-suited to the Julia language that alleviate some (but not all) of the need for debuggers. I’m skeptical about the “but not all” point. I’d be interested to know how many people in the julia community that work on big cod…

I didn’t intend to get into a debate, rather to summarize, but I’ll just say I like debuggers for understanding code, not necessarily for debugging it. Furthermore, some of us need debuggers specifically because we’re not master developers.

Hmm… this discussion sounds familiar :thinking:

[image] mancolric: [image] kristoffer.carlsson: Which people are you addressing with this post? To the developers (some of you, right?) I am not sure if you are aware of this, but a lot of the progress on Julia, its standard libraries, and the package ecosystem just happens because peo…

I fully agree with mancolric. I think my colleagues and I are one of Julia target audience. We suffer every day from the two language problem. We use mainly Matlab and Python to develop and test new algorithm. And if we are successfull these algorithm/scripts are transfered to C/C++/C# to run fast.…

As is often the case with these generic discussions, it’s hard to find out what people actually want when they say “julia needs a good debugger such as Matlab/Python/Java/C++/etc.”. Just saying “good debugger” doesn’t tell us anything about your actual needs and what’s wrong with the current e.g. De…

On a side-note, I think if you use the debugger in julia and think “but my code runs slow now” you shouldn’t think “I wish I was back in Matlab, where I didn’t notice the difference between debugging and not debugging and where I had to rewrite the code to make it fast and then verify that the rewri…

Debugger status and future plans?

Community

kevbonham October 8, 2020, 10:56pm 87

Hmm… this discussion sounds familiar

Topic		Replies	Views
Extremely slow debugging in VS Code New to Julia question , debugging , vscode	53	3235	January 20, 2025
Julia debugging is extremely slow New to Julia debug	102	2868	March 24, 2026
How do you use debuggers? Community	138	27318	September 28, 2018
Debugging extremely slow Tooling question	56	9809	September 5, 2023
Improve debugger GUI to help adoption? Juno	31	4184	March 24, 2020

Debugger status and future plans?

Related topics