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Comment by LeanderK | Hacker News Reader

i feel like one important piece thats missing is a standardised debugging-API. The introduction of WebAssembly will probably lead to a larger percentage of people compiling a (completely different) language to something running in the browser will rise. We need solid tooling for that.

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IIRC Firefox already implements the Chrome Debugging Protocol (https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/debugger-protocol), which e.g. would mean that it should be possible to use Firefox's debug tools to debug web pages in Chrome (and vice-versa). Would be nice to have some clarification on this though.

EDIT: Some more clarification, apparently this is enabled by an official add-on (called "Valence") which is shipped by default on Firefox Developer Edition: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Valence

i am not following this very closely and was not aware of this (Developed something in Chrome/Safari a few months ago and this bothered me. I needed a custom Webstorm-Extension). I think the push for Wasm would be perfect to sort this thing out and provide a real, standardised API.

Firefox doesn't implement the Chrome Debugging Protocol, but has it's own (FDP).

Valence is an protocol adapter that adapts CDP to FDP, so Firefox DevTools (using FDP) can be used with iOS (which uses WDP)

We're very interested in exploring this space. It's possible that this capability is exposed through an extension of sourcemaps [0]. Definitely curious to hear more ideas and feedback in this space.

[0]: http://webassembly.org/docs/future-features/#source-maps-int...

Before I left Google, I worked on this briefly and produced this PR: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/pull/708

It summarizes the discussion so far between various stakeholders. I've since moved on to other things, and I don't know where the effort currently stands.

Have you seen, http://remotedebug.org? The initiative is moving forward.

If there is some kind of advanced debugging platform, then this would also make the browser a premier platform as a development environment.

Solid tooling and plenty of prior art, tooling and standards that exist for adding debugging info to binaries[1]. I wonder if this could be layered into the WASM binary format in some way.

[1] DWARF2 et al.

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