Debugger wire protocol

[Keno]

@davidanthoff

Let me just describe how I imagine this would work in the end for VS Code, just so that you can check whether that squares with your design. In a typical debug session we would have three processes running. Process 1 is VS Code, i.e. all the UI. Process 2 is what is called a “debug adapter” in VS Code parlance. It would be written in julia. The debug adapter communicates with VS Code via the Microsoft Debug Protocol via STDIN and STDOUT. This debug adapter would use the new API in Gallium that allows debugging of other julia processes. Process 3 would be a julia instance that runs the user code and is controlled via the Gallium API from process 2.

Yeah that’s pretty much correct.

The actual API isn’t complete yet, so I can’t point you to an example (If you really want you can look at Arsenic.jl to see the C/C++ version, but it’s still a bit of a mess at the moment).

Remote debugging should be fairly simple. You’d just need an extra process:

VS Code <— VS Code protocol —> Debug Adapter ← Regular Julia RPC → Gallium.jl debugger ← ptrace, etc. → debuggee

no need for a special protocol in the middle.