Wbug

An terminal debugger for Erlang. This is a prototyp, all help, pull requests and bug reports are welcome.

Aims

• Ease to use over nice interface
• Not for production use ... Use redbug for that.

Don't

• Wbug doesn't work so nicely if you have a second process triggering a breakpoint while you'r debugging.
• Don't use this on a critical system
• Slow
• Code reloads

How does it work

This projects used the module int.erl. This is the same interface as the graphical erlang debugger runs. Modules with breakpoints are evaluated in a special interperter (much slower). When a breakpoints is triggers a meta processes is spawned. This is the processes that the this projects is communicating with (through the int module).

Setup

rebar compile

Demo

run/look at wbug:manual(), to see a little example.

TODO

• Another process hits a breakpoint while you're debugging -> some kind of queue.
• Choose process to debug from queue.
• Stop command that works. (Wbug currenlty uses 5 of the 13 commands that can be sent to the meta process).
• Currently only 2 unit tests that are covering parts of one module.
• Look at other debuggers to find nice features.
• More modes
• (timeout + stepping is a bad combo ... maybe some autostep that writes the terminal output to file).
• Other types from breakpoints (enter function, conditional break).