[MacRuby-devel] xcode debugger support

[Nat Brown]

having great fun with macruby and planning on building a lot of apps with it
-- thanks to everybody who has contributed to bringing my favorite language
to macs :)

that said, i see in http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/1208 and have now
suffered through with experience that proper debugger support in xcode is
not currently supported, nor does it appear to be imminent. while i am
plenty experienced with building big ruby things without a decent debugger
-- i've built some fairly huge RoR sites using little more than puts and log
grepping -- i don't think MacRuby will get far mainstream without integrated
xcode debugging.

lacking a real vote-up feature in http://bugreporter.apple.com, here is my
bug submission if anybody else on the list wants to also submit this bug to
"vote it up" -- this seems to be the only simple way to send a
message, so... submit early, submit often.

cheers, n@

*Title*: xcode does not offer an API to plug in alternate/complementary
debuggers
*ProblemID:* 9753880
*Product:* Developer Tools
*Version:* Xcode 4
*
*
*Summary:*

Using MacRuby and Xcode4 I can set breakpoints in Ruby files in the UI, but
the debugger does not support actually stopping, stepping, etc, nor can it
perform language-specific debugging/analysis/expression-evaluation.

Per http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/1208, this is minimally a limitation
of the debug infrastructure/API in xcode -- there is no API to integrate
debugging properly so no effort has been expended to support it in MacRuby.

*Steps to Reproduce:*

1. Create a MacRuby project following the instructions at
http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/03/12/creating-our-very-first-mac-application-with-ruby-how-exciting/.
Use Xcode4 instead of Xcode3 -- Xcode3 will support creating and building
the project, but won't allow you to even set breakpoints in the Ruby files
-- it doesn't understand which lines are code, indentation, etc.

2. Establish a breakpoint at e.g. from the example code some line within
MyWindowController.rb::MyWindowController::unveil_full_message_clicked

3. Build and run the project

4. Click on the "Unveil Full Message" button in the application's UI

*Expected Results:*

Debugger stops at MyWindowController::unveil_full_message_clicked and you
can inspect variables and evaluate Ruby expressions in the console.

*Actual Results:*

Debugger doesn't stop. You are now visualizing how you could possibly build
an interesting application in MacRuby using only NSLog and puts... hm,
challenging!

*Regression:*
*
*
*Notes:*
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