Show HN: Recompyle – A JavaScript developer-friendly console / debugger | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Recompyle – A JavaScript developer-friendly console / debugger

recompyle.com

58 pointsdam1152 comments

Hi HN, I'm Damien, the solo founder of Recompyle. Self-funded.

As a JavaScript developer, I have been annoyed by the console.log not being practical enough, and the debugger being 'too slow'. So I made Recompyle to fix that.

It's kind of a mix of the console and the debugger. Plus, some file parsing to automatically log the start of the functions of the files you are working on.

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"It's possible" and "it's easy" to make money in open source are two wildly different things. Pretty sure the creator of this knows it's possible to make money in open source but that charging $33 per year is also probably not going to cover all their expenses. They've done a ton of work (they made 2 IDE extensions!) and have likely been paid very little for it so far. If it's not for you then don't buy it but don't try to tell someone they can't charge peanuts selling something they've spent a ton of time making. 33 a year is practically nothing. Sometimes I swear this whole industry has been spoiled by the gifts of free labor

I think the problem here is not the price but charging for what seems a personal project or a product that isn't even finished. Why someone have to pay to test if this works? Don't get any traction...

Loads of people buy the beta versions of games. Others wait for the thing to be finished. It's an MVP and whether people buy is some of the most valuable feedback this dev is going to get.

I understand complaining about price if it's truly outrageous, but demanding it be Open Source (which is most often just dog whistling for it to be free) is peak entitlement.

I can see your points and think they are legit. Only think there are more alternatives to get real feedback than selling, why not choose a closed beta like others comments said? This could be much more productive.

I agree with that. I'm not sure on the specifics of this rollout but I think it's all still pretty risk free - it's got a 7 day free trial. If it's not up to par, one can cancel.

You're getting a lot of hot takes, which is too bad!

For my part, I've been trying to come up with something constructive to say but I'm having a rather hard time understanding what this project is, so I guess that's my feedback. The landing page tells me almost nothing about why I'd pay for a third-party debugger, and the docs on GitHub are only a little bit better and not super persuasive.

Maybe I'm just not the target audience, but I think you need to really capture the pain points you're solving before showing me screenshots and videos of how you've solved them. As it is all I'm seeing is a developer tools window with a slightly different layout than Firefox/Chrome.

> Maybe I'm just not the target audience, but I think you need to really capture the pain points you're solving before showing me screenshots and videos of how you've solved them. As it is all I'm seeing is a developer tools window with a slightly different layout than Firefox/Chrome.

Same here. I watched the video and couldn't quite figure out what it's trying to show. It just looks like it's logging requests similar to the inspector or the debugger. That's cool, but how is it different or better?

Looks like an alternative client for chrome://inspect and works on top of the same protocol (you need to launch with ‘—inspect’ flag).

Or the debug in vscode, then again in vscode you can edit the code also. Maybe this console has VM binding. Just feel like it should just be a vscode plugin.

> Closed Source

> For a sustainable business.

Especially when also associated with "Developer Friendly", seeing "closed source" with "sustainable" hurts so bad. I hope it does not persuade too many people. People should know that with open source software, they can rely on it not to disappear overnight if a company behind it vanishes. This is sustainable.

I work for an open source company without VC money that has been running for 20 years soon. They are ways to do open source and sustainable at the same time.

I'm torn on this. My absolute favorite piece of developer tooling is the JetBrains IDEs, which far outstrip all fully open source alternatives. They're partially open source, but the reason why JetBrains can make such great tools is because their model allows them to pay developers to work on their tools full time.

I love open source, but OP isn't wrong to decide to prioritize building a sustainable business over releasing their code.

Whether you personally prefer the guarantees that FOSS provides or the benefits that having salaried employees working on the project full time provides is a personal decision.

But I'm paid full time by my open source company, like my 60 colleagues, and the stuff we build is fully open source, except for custom, consulting projects based on this open source software we build.

Open core is at least something (and I'm forced to agree with you, IntelliJ mostly kills everything, I capitulated and ended up adopting the community version recently against other IDEs, initially for its Java debugger) but you can pay devs full time with completely open source stuff.

Companies are more than willing to pay for support, consulting or even paid pre-built binaries that come with a bit of support, when it's more convenient.

Again, not saying it's easy, and each project is different, but that's something possible.

What company are you working for? What is the business model?

Most successful open source companies I can think of are server-side applications or Linux distros, where the company sells support or hosting. I'm not sure how that would work for a desktop app.

> where the company sells support or hosting

Yep, you got this. We also sell open source extensions (yep, you could build and download the code, and strip the license handling, but somehow companies will pay for the convenience of having the install and upgrade done automatically - they also know that they support the company behind the thing they use, in a way that can be easily justified to their accounting department, with an invoice, and get some support hours included, which they like. Paying for something that is paid is easier than donating!). And we also do (a lot of) consulting.

For desktop applications, it might be harder indeed. Though JetBrains does have an extension store and could do the same, and also sell support.

Not sure about the consulting, but why not? Maybe they could sell some of the expertise they have on actually a big number of topics. I'm sure companies would be eager to pay them to implement feature in their IDEs they need, or to build components specific to their setup / projects. I'm discovering that companies will spend money on all sorts of things, I'm actually somewhat surprised by this.

Igalia [3], for instance, does this with browsers. They sell consulting around browsers and also get paid to contribute features in the big engines.

I mentioned curl earlier, Daniel gets paid for doing commercial support on curl [1]:

> I work for wolfSSL from home doing commercial curl support. If you need help to fix curl problems, fix your app's use of libcurl, add features to curl, fix curl bugs, optimize your curl use or libcurl education for your developers... Then I'm your man. Contact us!

There's also MediaInfo [2], an open source tool to get all sorts of information on videos. They get paid to implement features and to do consulting.

I'm sure you can sell support / consulting for all sorts of things.

> What company are you working for?

XWiki.

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/

[2] https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

[3] https://www.igalia.com/

> I hope it does not persuade too many people.

It's persuaded me, because it's true. Open-source is not a sustainable economic model, nor (with a few rare exceptions) business model.

> with open source software, they can rely on it not to disappear overnight if a company behind it vanishes. This is sustainable.

You're intentionally conflating two very different uses of the word "sustainable". This is not what the poster meant.

> People should know that with open source software, they can rely on it not to disappear overnight if a company behind it vanishes.

I've seen so many OSS projects abandoned because the maintainers couldn't find the time, given they had to work full-time on something else that would allow them to pay the bills.

Of course. You still need to make your project sustainable in some way.

You can sell support. You can sell consulting. You can do it the curl way and make yourself hired for developing your useful thing full time.

Not saying it's easy. Building a product and selling it in a way or another is not easy.

As a sibling comment say, at least the source is here, if you've come to rely on this unmaintained piece of code at least something is possible.

But I was mostly reacting to the association of "Closed Source" and "For sustainable business", like if sustainable business was not possible with open source. It is. Many companies succeed in this.

Doesn't work for tons of domains, e.g. native desktop software, games, good developer tooling like Enterprise Architect or OutSystems.

> native desktop software

But it can. I mentioned Igalia and MediaInfo, and developed on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38556450#38557836

I don't really know about games and good developer tooling, so I can't speak for these domains. Games are probably particularly tough. But I really think people may pay you for implementing features they need, buy support and for doing custom dev work. That last one takes your time out of your main product though, but if you manage to do custom work on top of your main product, it can still be a good deal.

Regular people, that already do pirate software a lot, see open source as free beer, and won't pay for any kind of support, rather have family members as usual.

With commercial desktop software at least there is the shadow of the law, thus some companies do survive despite piracy.

Hence why digital stores are so beloved by companies selling desktop like applications.

I bet there is hardly any company sustaining their business from sales on F-Droid.

I've seen the same, but with closed-source projects, and then there is zero hope of it ever being revived because no one can fork it. :(

At least with OSS, you have the power to patch it and recompile yourself.

I feel if the product is valuable enough and solves a real pain point, even if the backing company dies, an alternative will take its place.

I have also seen models where the source is made available just before that happens. For eg: https://www.placemark.io/post/placemark-is-winding-down

there are different classes of this.

I think the fact there are already an abundant amount of free and good tools for debugging JavaScript - many of which you don't even need extensions to use, its simply knowing how to get around the builtin debugger and inspector - make this class of product harder to make money off of.

Something like say a database is much harder to replicate and has a very high barrier to entry by comparison and have more verticals for actually acquiring and charging customers of the software

Neither of these are judgements for or against a thing, simply wanted to highlight the realities.

What I will say is this makes the barrier of entry for something like this very high before someone is willing to open their wallet.

That's where I stopped reading and closed the page.

I think you are sort of abusing the github logo above the "Closed Source - for a sustainable business model" text. Most people associate it with open source, it doesn't even make any sense there!

Haha it's almost like the Stroop effect, where you print the word "red" in blue ink instead of red ink.

I think you're solving a real pain point but to be honest I watched the video a few times and have trouble understanding how it works/differs from a regular debugger.

Agreed. Would make more sense with a red X over it.

Maybe I miss the point here, but it I see these sections as "why customers should choose us" so this point does not make any sense to me, since it's worse(or at least not adding value) from a customer view.

It's an interesting idea, but a few points:

* Your documentation states "Recompyle will not work for every project right now. It's a work in progress." Maybe an open/closed beta phase is appropriate right now instead of charging $33 for something that may not even work?

* I may be missing some functionality, but $33/year/user seems steep for something that I think I can emulate by just setting breakpoints normally and manually resuming process execution in Chrome Debugger.

* Your site seems to imply that Open Source projects cannot be sustainable businesses, but we see this all the time (Supabase, Aseprite, Miniflux). I would remove that from your site anyway because it's not exactly a selling point.

> Your site seems to imply that Open Source projects cannot be sustainable businesses, but we see this all the time (Supabase, Aseprite, Miniflux). I would remove that from your site anyway because it's not exactly a selling point.

Notably, 2/3 of your examples are server-side applications where the product is hosting, and Aseprite isn't open source, it's source-available.

In general, businesses around open source tend to either be selling hosting or support. For a client-side application, hosting isn't an option, and I also doubt that selling support packages will work for something small like developer tooling—the examples I can think of of client-side sustainable FOSS businesses are all Linux distros.

Do you have any other examples of client-side FOSS businesses that I'm missing?

Edit: one strategy I missed is open core, like JetBrains, but since that's a hybrid model I think that's actually evidence in favor of OP's claim that FOSS is hard to sustain.

> Do you have any other examples of client-side FOSS businesses that I'm missing?

Just thought about Linphone. (in addition to those I mentioned in my other comments)

https://linphone.org/

My point was to counter this idea that open-source === unprofitable, but another example is Mindustry https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry.

Oh, that's an interesting one! Available on Steam but also open source.

The trailer video needs narration and maybe some music, or at least music with some text describing what you're showing.

In dev-mode is use a separate monitor that logs human friendly output. That output is generated by frontend and backend and transfered via socket (errors too). I run automatically on save only that part of the app, that i am working on, normally with a test.

Only in a few special cases i need to debug and traverse errors step by step.

I can not understand why people use complicated bloated tools, in which you must click so many times until you get all needed data. Good log output is for me the best solution.

If there is a price, people will pay. Donation based oss just doesn't work except in a very few exceptions and specially not for software self-hosted. I support your statement on non-open source for sustainability. This is the same stance we took when we started Caido.

You could use some better marketing though, I am a web Dev and I didnt understand the value proposition.

Your screencast commits the sin of trying to fly through a demonstration from a script that you have access to but no one watching does. It's not clear what you're doing or what the significance of any given thing on screen is (and what things shown on the screen are insignificant). I'm at 0:24 of 1:32, I've skipped back 4 times to see what's going on and what you're trying to communicate. If you don't want to record audio to narrate what you're doing, that's fine, but go have a look at the Primitive Technology channel and take note of how he uses captions for a non-existent audio track. Copy that, if nothing else; the video as-is is ineffective—not quite useless but very close.

Not a JS dev…but looks like he is just triggering breakpoints in the video? But yeah, it’s mostly useless. Maybe the tool is good though, can’t really tell.

The name sounds like a Python project.

This was my initial reaction too, especially since "Decompyle" was a popular python bytecode decompiler ("was" because it seems to have been superseded by pycdc at this point)

I write web code all day every day which makes me think I'm the target audience. I have no idea what this does beyond the built in dev tools. From what I gleamed from the video, it looks like it might make it easier to setup watch variables?

I see in the product demo he's debugging from WebStorm with Chrome. The problem I very much need solved here is that if I set a breakpoint, and stop execution Chrome has to be closed and completely relaunched to hit a break point again. Hitting Stop somehow disconnects Chrome and Storm in a way that refresh does not fix or reconnect. It's extremely annoying and tedious.

They used to have a web extension for Firefox and Chrome that let you re-connect by clicking on it. I know they deprecated that in favor of what they do now (which I think is partially facitilated by changes in how extensions are handled by both those respective browsers) but I do hit this issue more than I'd like as well

This is rad, Damien. Great work.

Can you send an email to ryan.glover@cheatcode.co (didn't see anything listed on the site)? Want to discuss how I could make this work with Joystick [1].

[1] https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick

Since it's a paid product, i would like to shill for an open source product that performs a similar function: https://github.com/djblue/portal

Unfortunately, it is only usable for a clojure(script) code base, as it requires a REPL. For a live demo of what it does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-iyDo3bq0 , or just explore the UI and see for yourself https://djblue.github.io/portal/

I don't think I would ever use this project, and I especially would not pay for it.

From scanning the website and documentation, it seems like a less useful debugger than currently available open source tools. I really have no idea what this project is trying to achieve.

and then there's this:

> Yes you need an account to use recompyle.

> The account is used to validate the license. Nothing more.

> The only thing send to our server is a hash of your "machineId"

> The App run on you computer, your code is private and not send to our servers.

> No analytics or error tracking.

You expect me to simply trust your word that this debugger won't do anything nefarious? Not a chance.

You just pretty print console logs at breakpoint location. IDE extension + some web app. Why closed source lol. I won't pay for it, could build my own. Sorry but you first need open source traction and then try to sell to enterprises. Good luck

Not every project needs to be open source. It’s his work and his business, if he wants it closed source that’s perfectly fine.

The audacity, charging for a service which you know doesn't work everywhere lol

Not all that different from paying for a "Only works on Mac" app, but it does seem odd to charge this much for something that isn't done yet. This is open/closed beta territory, not "charging money before it's even ready" territory.

Closed source. Easy skip sir.

Nah. Not everyone is an OSS zealot. If a tool works for me I don’t give a shit if it is open or closed source.

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