Julia debugging is extremely slow

New to Julia
1

I was programming quite a bit in julia about 5-6 years ago but ended up quitting since the debugger was just too unuseable. Now I’m testing it out again for a small side project and I once again find myself with the same issue and I’m wondering whether nothing has really happened in these 5-6 years?

In particular I’m trying to adapt an old fortran code to Julia and want to be able to step through my adaptation line by line and compare whether things are behaving the same in both languages. However it seems I am unable to do so since this line:
df_met = CSV.read(met_file, DataFrame)
Is apparently too much for the debugger to handle?
I really do not understand how it can have trouble with this. I have previously loaded in a very small csv file using a similar call (that file was 307 bytes), the file I am trying to load in now is a bit bigger but still only 731.4 kb (it loads in around ~0.01s) when I time it and do not use the debugger.
However when using the debugger it completely halts my program and seems unable to pass that line (I have waited up to 5 minutes without it completing…)

Is this really still the state of debugging in Julia or do I need to change the default debugging setup somehow for things to work?

In other similar threads I see people mentioning that they are using the repl instead of a debugger but I don’t really see how that is supposed to work?

2

I would recommend just using Infiltrator.jl and putting an @infiltrate everwhere you want to inspect variables, and remove all of them when you are done.

1 Like
3

Well, you can select which libraries shall be compiled. If you are not debugging the CSV library, just compile it: Debugging · Julia in VS Code

You can also try https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/29356-flexible-julia, which is a commercial offering, so you need to pay for it unless you work at a university. On the other hand, if you have a bug report or feature request they address that very fast.

4

I haven’t followed the jetbrains plugin. Do you know what the state of debugging is there?

My debugging struggles in vs code is more often that it just won’t start for some code.