From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2006-07-06T16:14:39+09:00
Subject: Re: debugging proposal

Max Muermann wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> First up, I'm new to this list and to Ruby. Let me express my gratitude
> to Matz (and others) for creating such a wonderful programming
> environment. I have only been playing with Ruby for about a week, and I
> have loved every minute of it. Just reading Ruby code makes me smile...
> 
> However, there is one thing that is bugging (or rather debugging?) me,
> which is the lack of performant debugging support in the language.

You're not going to like this response, but after ruby sinks in and gets 
in your veins, this is how you debug:

1. refactor

2. unit test

3. write to stdout / stderr / log files

4. insert irb breakpoints (explicit method calls that drop into an irb 
shell)

5. set up druby interface so you can control and query a process remotely

I've almost never used debug.rb or trace.rb in 5.5 years of rubying, and 
#4 and #5 rarely. That, after being addicted to the MSVC++ debugger. 
Still, if there were a very nice, free, fast, GUI debugger for ruby, I'd 
probably give it a spin.

Anyway, enough with being flippant. Your breakpoint mechanism looks 
interesting. It would be nice to connect to a running program with drb 
and tell it to stop next time it hits some file/line, and then be able 
to evaluate strings in the current binding. If we could do this with 
only a small loss in performance (and no loss when no breakpoints are 
enabled), I'd use it.

-- 
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407