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Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

replay.io

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Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#51
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks amazing, thank you for building it. Since React got mentioned several times on the landing page, i need to ask: is it framework agnostic?

(Replay employee here): We have experimental support for some react-specific features using react-devtools since React is such a common framework, but the Replay is a general debugging tool and will work with other frameworks well too.

Great. First saw one in Elm years ago, someone already mentioned prior art by Bret Victor though. Glad to see an agnostic tool for everyone.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#52
This looks fantastic. Can't wait to try it out.

I want this to succeed, so I want the company to succeed. On that note I think you guys should change up your pricing.

Seems like there's too big a gap b/w the free forever (individual) and $20/mo/user for team.

I'd love to pay for this as an individual at a smaller amount - like $10/mo - for a few extra features. Or maybe reduce the functionality of free forever.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#53

I am a JavaScript framework author, and was one of those fortunate to get early access and honestly it is the most useful tool I've ever used in the debugging space. Sometimes things are complicated. Often there is a need to do digging to uncover the issue. Being able to move forward and backwards and even jumping between seemingly disjoint parts of the timeline are all at your disposal with Replay. Replay has saved…

Now I'm even more excited.

Replay Team - please consider charging a reasonable amount ($10/mo) for individuals/small teams. I want this to be viable as a business.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#54

Co-founder here. It feels incredible to be sharing Replay with all of you. It's been a labor of love the past five years! Replay started off as a simple experiment in what would happen if we added a step back button and rewind button to the Debugger. We quickly realized two things. First, nobody uses breakpoints. Second, being able to share is so much more powerful than being able to rewind. Here’s how Replay works t…

> First, nobody uses breakpoints. It saddens me that a lot of people don't use debuggers and default to adding print statements. As far as I can tell, it's for several reasons: 1. The debugger is primitive (e.g. Godot GDScript - no conditional breakpoints or watches). 2. The debugger is unstable (e.g. Android Studio - frequently hangs, or takes a long time to populate data needlessly) 3. The debugger's UI is not frie…

Maybe 2a. Executing code (like a print) in an auto-continuing breakpoint action makes the program itself pause; especially tiresome when you're looking at a timing or performance issue.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#55

What are the limits for the recordings in terms of time and input data size? Edit: on Ubuntu 18.04 I get the following error: $ ./replay ./replay: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.29' not found (required by ./replay)

(Replay engineer here):

> What are the limits for the recordings in terms of time and input data size?

The best answer right now is that it varies a lot depending on overall CPU usage, the amount of memory used, and the length, so it's somewhat difficult to nail down. Right now we recommend less than 2 minutes long as an attempt to keep things reasonable, but if it's 2 minutes at full CPU usage it may still not load.

> on Ubuntu 18.04 I get the following error:

For the Glibc error, I'll ask around but not sure off the top of my head.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#57

Co-founder here. It feels incredible to be sharing Replay with all of you. It's been a labor of love the past five years! Replay started off as a simple experiment in what would happen if we added a step back button and rewind button to the Debugger. We quickly realized two things. First, nobody uses breakpoints. Second, being able to share is so much more powerful than being able to rewind. Here’s how Replay works t…

> First, nobody uses breakpoints. It saddens me that a lot of people don't use debuggers and default to adding print statements. As far as I can tell, it's for several reasons: 1. The debugger is primitive (e.g. Godot GDScript - no conditional breakpoints or watches). 2. The debugger is unstable (e.g. Android Studio - frequently hangs, or takes a long time to populate data needlessly) 3. The debugger's UI is not frie…

Are there any good books on using debuggers effectively?

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#59
Replay employee here. Personally, I'm excited to see maintainers slowly phase out "Please include steps to reproduce" in issues, and replace it with "Can you make a replay"?

Partly because I want to see the product do well, but also selfishly as an engineer, because we've been dogfooding replay and it's made squashing bugs 10x easier. Having somebody attach a replay to an issue makes that issue immediately better than an expertly-written one, which as an engineer, I can start debugging in seconds with minimal back-and-forth.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#60

For those who are looking to similar tooling in back end space, check - https://undo.io/ (It can also support Golang https://docs.undo.io/GoDelve.html ) - Mozilla RR https://rr-project.org/ - GDB https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/news/reversible.html Unfortunately, works only in Linux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_debugging

(Replay engineer): We're big fans of RR and pernosco, I love to see those tools get their due. Replay is also designed to support backend programs. We [support Node](https://github.com/RecordReplay/node) today with more runtimes coming soon.
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