An Introduction Of A New Debugging And Code Inspection Concept

[Arnim Schachtschabel]

Hello Community,

I have developed a new concept for debugging and code inspection. This approach unites approved solutions and complements them with new features.

I invite you, to have a look at the concept at gitHub.

I have also uploaded a prototype, so you can see, that I am not talking about a theoretic construct. I have already laid the foundation for a very versatile and convenient tool.

Please, don't be disappointed, that the prototype does not show the features that are presented in the concept, yet. They are about to come.

I am looking forward for your opinion.

Kind regards
Arnim

[der Raab]

Hi Arnim, this is way to complex to incorporate this in a couple of minutes. Maybe we should some day have a beer an you show me more. Looks like you figured out how to use macros ;)

[Arnim Schachtschabel]

Hello Markus,

I am looking forward to it.

Kind regards
Arnim

[Arnim Schachtschabel]

Hello Community,

yesterday I have seen that Nicolas Cannasse also has presented a debugger and code inspector. You could find some similarities between the two concepts, if you do not look into them too deeply. But believe it or not: I haven't oriented myself to Nicolas' concept, although he propagated it two months ago.

You will find the idea of a stand alone (not really a server) receiver of the signals that are sent from the evaluated source code. I have conceptioned that due to the experience of null pointer exceptions in C++ targets, that are very annoying to debug. A process that lives longer than the buggy one is supposed to tell how far the code has been executed before the null pointer occured.

You will also find the evaluation of the inspection as a html-page. In that case, I have been inspired by Massive's Munit and MCover unit-testing framework. I consider this to be the most handy solution as long as I do not have an openGL based infrastructure (which also is on top of my agenda).

I have been working on this debugger, documentation and unit-testing concept since my internship at Bayer und Preuß GmbH.

You can have a look on it on your own  gitHub

I consider it to be of major importance to present and to discuss ideas and concepts in a public community. Every one who shares his thoughts should be sure and safe that his ideas are not copied one by one.

So, I hope, I still enjoy your trust, that these similarities just occured on random. And I hope, that nobody feels offended. To keep the cooperative spirit alive within this great community means a lot to me.

Kind regards
Arnim

[francesco agati]

hi Arnim,
ih this months i am play with pharo(smalltalk) and racket(scheme) and i really love the experience of live coding and interactions with objects and code.

you can see an example of what i say in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDvNuOjdjY4

haxe is only compile time. But the idea of having an immersive programming enviroment in haxe  should be really a big change. But i don't think this is possible to do in haxe.

What do you think about a this type of programming experince?

[francesco agati]

we should have the possibility of compile and generate haxe code a runtim. a version of hscript but with support for macros,classess,type static  and all the feature of haxe.

maybe that cppia can resolve this problem?

[Arnim Schachtschabel]

Hello Francesco,

although manipulating haxe code on runtime sounds very intriguing to me, it is not on top of my agenda, yet.

And I am not sure, if your interest has so much to do with the topic of this thread anyway. So, why don't you start a thread of your own?

Kind regards
Arnim

[Arnim Schachtschabel]

PS:
But I can offer you, once it is implemented, a feature to place a dedicated function (or any other code) at a specific position in your source code for specific purposes on compileTime, e.g. for more sophisticated testing purposes. I have called this "macro infusion".

To be more concrete:

I am about to develop a 3D Software on the long run. I will use macro infusion to implement a visualization of vectors for a debugging version of the software. These vectors are only interims results and wouldn't be shown in the final release version of the software.

So, macro infusion will help me to test each step of data manipulation with methods others than just code debugging.

Maybe your needs are pleased with this concept as well. You can check it out on gitHub

Kind regards
Arnim