Comment by tsimionescu
2 days ago
> I happen to use ruby at work and native debugging is enough - you can drop into an interactive console at a breaking point adding a single line, with no tooling.
If you've only ever used this type of debugging, you should really try out a real IDE debugger once. The difference in productivity when you can use your IDE to navigate to, say, the usages of a function and then just press a keyboard shortcut to put a breakpoint on the line with that usage is immense.
Compare this to the native debug support: you have to leave the interactive debugger, move to your editor, find usages, note down the file name and line number, then go back to your interactive debugger and type a manual break command (break my_file.rb:2517 or something). All of that context switching and remembering is replaced by a single keyboard shortcut in Emacs, VS Code, or any other integrated debugger. And no, adding manual breakpoints in your source code is not simpler - what I'm describing works interactively while your code is already running, whereas a breakpoint statement requires you to restart the whole process.
>If you've only ever used this type of debugging, you should really try out a real IDE debugger once.
It's the opposite, I learned to program with java for android so a full IDE was my first experience. As I moved to node and then go and ruby I just gradually used it less and less as I generally 'debug' creating tests to check/reproduce behavior.
I do think I should improve my debugging, but mostly in terms of profiling. I very rarely feel the need to see a codepath run line by line.
I'm not saying my system is better or worse to be clear, I've just naturally gravitated to not using the debugger - I couldn't tell you why.
I have inline debugging with gdb in neovim.
<leader>+b/B: add/remove breakpoint
<leader>+n/N: step/over
... and so on.
To start it just run :termdebug. If you change the debugger to rr you can even replay.
It's a shame the language support is poor, but I'm sure they'll add DAP support eventually.
This is exactly what I meant by an integrated debugger. I probably should have used the term IDE less, as that brings to mind Visual Studio or Eclipse and such - but I just meant any integrated editor+debugger, whether neovim, Emacs, or whatever else.