Hi Evan,
Thanks for sharing this.
This sounds very interesting. If it is possible, it would be great to turn your experience
in a case study. Would you like to connect and provide more details?
If you have questions about how to extend the debugger, please do not hesitate to ask. It
would help us guide the documentation effort.
Cheers,
Doru
On Jun 5, 2016, at 5:35 AM, Evan Donahue
<emdonahu(a)gmail.com> wrote:
For what it's worth, the moldable debugger/inspector framework has been an
excellent fit for my current project, which involves an embedding of a
domain specific logic programming language in Pharo. Since all of the
internal computation is done using placeholder "logic variables" that
don't
actually contain any meaningful Smalltalk values, attempting to step through
the execution just shows you an endless sea of "a Var, a Var, a Var." The
custom inspector can look up the logic variables' current bindings and
display meaningful information at any point in the computation.
Moreover, as I start to move from building the low level framework to
building applications using that framework, it has become increasingly
difficult to debug, since between every pair of significant domain-specific
events lies a vast cascade of calls down into the low level infrastructure
that tells me nothing about the logic of the program written on top of that
infrastructure. It is not obvious that a more powerful generic debugger
would solve this problem, since the program's "code" isn't actual Pharo
code
that a debugger can affix breakpoints to and step through, but rather a
syntax tree made of vanilla Pharo objects that is only meaningful to the
"interpreter." I have only just started playing with debugger extensions,
but it seems promisingly like it will be able to do what I need.
This would be a significant accomplishment, since this particular DSL is
notoriously hard to debug in other languages for the above stated reasons,
and the standard debugging procedure usually involves a certain amount of
"staring harder" at the code.
Cheers,
Evan
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