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Comment by LewisJEllis | Hacker News Reader

"they have seemingly just ignored the better option...obviously much nicer"

This comes off a bit presumptuous. I would assume that they are aware this is a possibility.

"having to use a web service to view you stack trace"

This is just not a downside that matters for this usage scenario. It's almost the same story as minifying your frontend JS bundle, uploading source maps to Sentry, then using Sentry to view an unminified stack trace from a user's browser. The user was never going to view that stack trace anyway, and I am not bothered by having to use Sentry to view it - I never would have seen it at all otherwise.

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> The user was never going to view that stack trace anyway

Speak for yourself.

The ability to understand and affect what's going on in your own user agent is important not just to users having control over their own devices, it changes the social fabric. You can't get interested in how something works because to you it's an opaque blob whose priests have declared you unworthy. Curiosity suppressed. That's bad for the kids.

if you want that you can always just run the application with debug symbols, no?

The user is all too often not provided with debug symbols.

Bun is open source, right? If you want the debug symbols then build them. This feature is for the users who don’t want to debug Bun and simply submit a comprehensive report, which will be the majority of users.

Bun is MIT licensed, meaning any derivatives aren't required to give you source code. But it's more about the principle. People do the same thing in web pages and give you minified gibberish "to save bandwidth". Meanwhile the hot garbage is still a megabyte of JS. Maybe cut some of the bloat and keep the human-readable text which is known to be efficiently compressed by ordinary lossless compression algorithms.

> This comes off a bit presumptuous. I would assume that they are aware this is a possibility.

They don't present it here, they justify their solution by claiming that the existing solution is bad because it includes several megabytes of debug symbols.

On the note of awareness of possibilities vs ignorance, I found this thread on HN to be gold: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37592471

The creator of Vue pointed out a new feature for Svelte was a similar feature that Vue had tried and discarded. The creator of Svelte showed up to explain their position; I thought their exchange was illuminating. I was also impressed by Vue's research & experimentation.

> I am not bothered by having to use Sentry to view it

I am. And by source maps in general.

> The user was never going to view that stack trace anyway,

Well akchually, I found stack traces useful as a user. It allowed me to pinpoint an issue (SPICE simulator crashing due to inconsistent quote handling in E-sources vs another simulator which did not crash). IDK how else I'd be able to find this other than file a Jira ticket to the simulator team (and then wait 2 days for various people to pass the ticket, as they almost always do)

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