[MacRuby-devel] Is is possible to debug a MacRuby Cocoa app?

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Nov 21, 2010, at 3:49 PM, Ryan Porter wrote:

> I've managed to figure out, after an hour or two of wasted time, that although MacRuby now includes a debugger, that debugger can't be used to debug a MacRuby Cocoa app.  Not only through XCode, but at all.  Is that correct?  The release notes proudly announce that MacRuby now includes a debugger but they neglect to mention how to use it.  After some research I eventually discovered that there is no way to use the debugger to debug a Cocoa app.

I think this is not a case of deliberate (or unknowing) omission so much as a little over-enthusiastic "marketing" of a command-line-only debugging feature that itself is just barely out of alpha-quality status.  Calling what is currently there an "experimental debugger" would probably be more accurate, and set expectations more correctly, but you can't really blame the developers for an abundance of enthusiasm for something which is, at least, the start of something in this area.  It's kind of an ugly truth about most interpreted languages, from Tcl to Python to Ruby, that the integrated debugging support basically sucks and is rarely designed into the default implementations of said languages.   Proponents of those languages generally claim that it's so easy to sprinkle debugging "printfs" into their code, emit log messages, etc, that they don't *need* a debugger, whereas I suspect that the kind of debugging experience you're looking for probably involves a graphical IDE with debugging breakpoints set in the source browser/editor in addition to views for watched variables, calling context information, and all the other fun stuff you'd expect from an interpreted language debugger.  Sorry, but such a thing has simply not been implemented yet!

- Jordan