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Comment by ternaryoperator | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reasonably good IDE for Nim that provides debugging, specifically the full debugging experience (Nim code rather than C, breakpoints, inspect/modify values, etc.)? That's been the gating factor for me trying it. What's the present situation?

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I'm using Claude Code... And then for manual review and editing, using Zed with Nim extensions: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/nim

Sorry, I don't really do debuggers... I mostly step through code interactively using a REPL (INim).

I ran into some problems with Zed and Nim which I eventually solved by enhancing the LSP’s settings. This might be useful for anyone interested https://blog.ameri.coffee/using-zed-for-nim-development

I see comments like this fairly often and in my entire career (I'm 53) I've never had to use a debugger. For inspection of values, I write small functions and unit tests or just output to stderr in debug modes set with env vars. I've always thought that the need to use a debugger was a code smell- too much cyclomatic complexity of single functions.

Have you ever used rr though?

https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr

it... goes backwards in time?

OK, THIS is interesting!

Does Nim not output the #line directives when compiling to C? That alone should help with the debugging experience.

Sure! Just compile with nim c --lineDir=on or drop `lineDir=on` in your $HOME/.config/nim/nim.cfg (or per project NimScript .nims or per file foo.nim.cfg or ...) and source-level debugging with gdb on Linux works..

mostly at the level of Nim source, although various things are likely to "leak through" like mangled names (though in fairness, lower-level assembly notions leak through in "C source level" debugging...).

Beware, though, that since around Spring 2024 this can make the tinycc/tcc backend infinite loop (but otherwise tcc can be a nice way to get fast development iteration).

Also recently Nim’s generated C code started using Itanium name mangling, which oddly has become the defacto name mangling method for C++ on Linux and other platforms.

Meaning you get pretty function names with generic types and all included with debuggers that support it. Works better with ldb as gdb seems to refuse to recognize it.

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