State of the Debugger

General Usage
16

You probably all know about Rebugger. I haven’t had any time to work on it lately, and probably won’t for a couple more months. I’d like to encourage people who are impatient for a debugger to jump in and help make it better. Here are reasons to consider this:

  • Rebugger and Revise (upon which Rebugger is based) are pretty extensively documented, even down to the internals. I did this precisely to make it easier for others to contribute, but if anything it’s had the opposite effect.
  • Rebugger is tiny: the core src/debug.jl file is currently 600 lines of code and, other than Revise, has no significant dependencies.
  • Rebugger does not interact with call stacks; everything is done in terms of julia expressions. That means anyone who has written or edited a macro or otherwise worked with Julia expressions has the background needed to pitch in—this is not rocket science.
  • I’ve outlined solutions to things like how to add breakpoints. Once breakpoints are added, I think it can interact with graphical debuggers (aka, Juno).
  • The Julia compiler team’s priorities linked above by Stefan (which is a fantastic list, and ordered the same way I’d order it) suggests it will be a while before there’s another solution, unless someone outside the team picks up Gallium on their own.

Here are some of the most impactful ways to help out:

10 Likes