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Comment by cxcorp | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! Looks like this project has some high ambitions:

> What's after that?

> Tons of stuff. Tons and tons and tons of stuff.

> Debuggers have not substantially evolved since the first Turbo Debugger in 1988!

> For example, we have had GUI debuggers for 20 years now, and we can't see bitmaps! We can't hear sound buffers. We can't view vertex arrays.

> We can't graph values over time. We can't even load a debugging session from yesterday and review it! We have a long way to go.

> Debugging is desperate need of updating, and we see as a long term project. We'll be adding visualizers, new debugging workflows (step through code on multiple platforms at the same time for example), and new features for a long time.

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Fun fact, you can plot variable values over time with gdb. You just have to create a gdb extension to do it: https://github.com/jyurkanin/gdb_extensions This blew my mind when I figured out how to make these extensions and everyone should be making their own extensions. It's a force multiplier. Literally life changing

We can't even load a debugging session from yesterday and review it! We have a long way to go.

Time Travel Debugging provided by WinDbgX doesn't count? Or are they talking about all of the commands executed, etc. along with that?

The page is quite dated and probably predates it.

The archived page claims they started in 2013. Time travel debugging was commercially available (by other vendors [1]) for over a decade by that point.

[1] https://jakob.engbloms.se/archives/1564

When I used Xcode for the first (and so far only) time I was surprised I could actually view bitmaps in the debugger and I've wondered why that's not commonplace ever since.

Most people don't know what they're missing. None of the pages linked (in either the submission itself or the comments here) or other comments actually show any of these graphical features in use.

This is a problem that extends beyond this submission and talk of debuggers. It's basically insurmountable for anyone who didn't use Google Reader to know what the experience is using it looked and felt like (and in a few months when it will no longer be possible to use Google Podcasts, there'll be another casualty).

Reading your comment, all I know is that Xcode lets you "view bitmaps in the debugger", but that's a pretty varied range of possibilities for someone who hasn't actually seen it.

Folks who are looking to have an impact would do well to document their setups and show how they actually get work done, lest we end up in a future where people don't know how to run a Python program[1] because nobody was ever explicit about it, instead relying on tacit familiarity.

1. <https://corecursive.com/brain-injury-with-jason-mcdonald/>

The fact that the best example I could find being a StackOverflow question about whether such a feature even exists kinda proves your point: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2780793/xcode-debugging-...

The answer even has a comment saying:

> Ages coding in Xcode and I never knew about this feature! This is awesome!!! Thanks a lot

We really have a problem in this industry about documenting institutional knowledge huh?

I suppose one reason is that images can be stored in many different ways in memory. For OpenCV images in C++ the Visual Studio extension Image Watch is quite nice, I think it's been around for more than 15 years:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualCP...

There's also a recent extension called Image Preview for path references:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/working-with-ima...

> we can't see bitmaps! We can't hear sound buffers. We can't view vertex arrays.

I kinda miss Lauterbach...

Have they made any progress on that? If so, it's not obvious from the screenshots and linked repo.

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