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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

#111

Post by jazzdan »

kodeninja wrote: post #102
jasonlaster11 wrote: post #4

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…

Congratulations! This looks super interesting! How are side effects (mutating HTTP calls, cookie creation, other I/O) handled?

(Replay engineer): we basically record all the inputs and outputs to a program. In the example of an HTTP request: when recording we'd record that a request was made, and the response. When replaying, rather than make the HTTP request, we return the response that was recorded.

If you're interested you can learn more about how Replay works here: https://medium.com/replay-io/how-replay-works-5c9c29580c58

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#112

Post by jasonlaster11 »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #84

Isn’t this what was in Firefox for a while before it was ripped out and I guess made into a private company? I’m pretty damn bummed by this thing.

We've come a long way from the web replay days. We re-wrote the recorder to support additional runtimes like Node.js and Chrome. Replay is also cloud-based, so recordings are shareable and super fast.

We're really grateful for the support we had within Mozilla in the early days, but what we've come to learn is that projects like Replay really benefit from being able to be nimble and solely focused on a great experience which is difficult when you're a small feature in a larger product.

Also you can find our runtime forks and entire frontend on github. http://github.com/RecordReplay/

Happy to answer any additional questions.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#113

Post by jasonlaster11 »

jasonlaster11 wrote: post #112
rubyn00bie wrote: post #84

Isn’t this what was in Firefox for a while before it was ripped out and I guess made into a private company? I’m pretty damn bummed by this thing.

We've come a long way from the web replay days. We re-wrote the recorder to support additional runtimes like Node.js and Chrome. Replay is also cloud-based, so recordings are shareable and super fast. We're really grateful for the support we had within Mozilla in the early days, but what we've come to learn is that projects like Replay really benefit from being able to be nimble and solely focused on a great experien…

We've come a long way from the web replay days. We re-wrote the recorder to support additional runtimes like Node.js and Chrome. Replay is also cloud-based, so recordings are shareable and super fast.

We're really grateful for the support we had within Mozilla in the early days, but what we've come to learn is that projects like Replay really benefit from being able to be nimble and solely focused on a great experience which is difficult when you're a small feature in a larger product.

Also you can find our runtime forks and entire frontend on github. http://github.com/RecordReplay/

Happy to answer any additional questions.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#114

Post by jasonlaster11 »

jahewson wrote: post #58

If this works in CI with Cypress then it’s a game changer. No more chasing down flaky tests that pass locally. Genuinely excited!

Cypress support is coming soon. We've got playwright and puppeteer and have done the hard things with cypress. just have to get the dx polished.

https://github.com/RecordReplay/devtools/issues/3225

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#116

Post by jasonlaster11 »

exabrial wrote: post #40

Side note: There used to be a product called "Chronon" back 10-12 years ago... The blog spammed Dzone and a lot of other websites and refused to pay for advertising. Their CEO encouraged people to stop writing log statements out and just run their debugger all the time. Looks like it's defunct now: http://www.chrononsystems.com

haha i didnt know about the advertising annecdote, but yeah we get a lot of references to Chronon from those that remember :)

We knew early on that a cool debugger wasn't going to cut it. Replay had to be super easy to adopt, fast, secure, and stable. That's our goal!

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#117

Post by vaughan »

optymizer wrote: post #45
jasonlaster11 wrote: post #4

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…

Couldn't agree more. Debugger support in modern codebases has become a huge after-thought which is such a shame.

It is an amazing way to discover how a codebase works. You pick a point of interest, and then you get the entire path from the beginning of the app's execution to that point as your stack trace, and every variable along the way too. Watches are great too for tracking a value changing over time.

Micro-services and Docker also took debugging many steps backwards - one advantage of a monolith is that you can easily step-through the entire execution, whereas if you have to cross process-boundaries it becomes a lot more complex to properly debug.

I'm working on a monorepo template at the moment where everything is debuggable with a single-click. This includes debugging native addons in C++ and Rust for Node.js projects. It's not easy - which is why people avoid debuggers so much.

I recently setup debugging in a Rust project for IntelliJ was the alternative was adding `dbg()!` statements which involved 10s recomplilation. The difficulty was implementing the right pretty-printers in lldb so you could see the value of various types because support is quite immature at the moment.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#118

Post by jazzdan »

arathore wrote: post #106
jasonlaster11 wrote: post #4

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…

Currently the only way to sign up for a personal account is through google. Is there another way that I am missing, or are there any plans to provide email based signups in the future?

(Replay engineer) Google is currently the only way unfortunately. We wanted to support secure logins at launch, with SSO and Multi-factor Authentication, and focus most of our efforts on the core product. As a result we just went with Google for launch.

We don't currently have any plans to add additional authentication mechanisms but we've heard this feedback from a couple folks and we'll sit down to prioritize it after the excitement of launch has died down. Sorry about that!

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#119

Post by jonbell »

swyx wrote: post #5

That landing page looks right out of Bret Victor's time travel demos ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqA , or http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ ). Communicates the value instantly. Incredibly well done! IMO the most time consuming issue in triaging bug reports is reproducing them. Replay definitively solves the "can't repro this" problem.

Replay’s designer here.

Bingo! We’ve been iterating on our story for a year, and the “let’s refer to Learnable Programming” angle felt like a huge breakthrough.

So glad it resonated with you, thanks for letting us know!

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#120

Post by ddoolin »

optymizer wrote: post #45
jasonlaster11 wrote: post #4

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…

Just my anecdote: Personally I don't like using the one in Xcode (and maybe I'm missing something obvious) because I got so used to the debugger in JS land where I get access to a live REPL which functions just like the code I write. In Xcode, I'm stuck with some lldb prompt which I don't understand and definitely doesn't function like the one in JS tooling. I'm sure it could be more useful if I invested more time into learning it, but the barrier is there.
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