Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#131

Post by alexhutcheson » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

shepherdjerred wrote: post #57

optymizer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Not a book, but Andreas Zeller’s free “Software Debugging” course on Udacity is excellent: https://www.udacity.com/course/software-debugging--cs259

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#132

Post by dorianmariefr » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:08 PM UTC

I logged in then I couldn't load my website, then it couldn't show me a recording (not sure if it saved it), then it crashed.

IMHO having Firefox as a base is not a great idea, Chrome would be better and closer to what users use.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#133

Post by z3j4e » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

jasonlaster11 wrote: post #115

z3j4e wrote: post #65

I would like to try it but sadly the only way to register an account is by using google. Thanks no.

Apologies for that. That was what was easiest. How would you like to sign up?

Not with a 3rd-party provider.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#134

Post by alin23 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

Man, I wish I could use something like this for my Swift macOS app [1]

I’ve got tons of crash reports in Sentry that I have no idea what to do about.

On things like:

    CFRelease() called with NULL

replay could help me find where the heck that NULL came from as I don’t have any CFRelease call in my code

Or the more annoying

    BUG IN CLIENT OF LIBDISPATCH: Assertion failed: Block was expected to execute on queue [com.apple.main-thread]

Like, how does that specific line run perfectly fine thousands of times and then every once in a while it decides it needs the main thread. I wish I could replay that traceback to see why the main thread is suddenly needed.

[1] https://lunar.fyi

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#135

Post by vasama » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

desi_ninja wrote: post #124

Windows has this for time travel debugging : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de... . Visual studio also supports TTD https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/introducing-time...

Only the enterprise edition though.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#136

Post by dorianmariefr » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:25 PM UTC

dorianmariefr wrote: post #132

I logged in then I couldn't load my website, then it couldn't show me a recording (not sure if it saved it), then it crashed. IMHO having Firefox as a base is not a great idea, Chrome would be better and closer to what users use.

seems like it worked but now I'm stuck at "Uploading replay" https://app.replay.io/recording/8731334f-4731-4c10-beee-7e4a...

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#137

Post by tiborsaas » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

Today I spent maybe more than an hour tracing a bug that a screen I created turned inaccessible after a merge, tests died suddenly.

It turned out to be multiple cases, one was that a colleague changed a default export to a named one which excluded my screen. Another was an in an unrelated test which missed a React context wrapper so I needed to refactor her tests.

I don't know what kind of magic debugging tool would help with these kinds of things.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#138

Post by skinnymuch » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #123

Congrats on launching! The good: I checked out the tool and seems to work as advertised. Also nice to see Replay browser based on a Firefox fork. The bad (and this is more your marketing/PR/branding, not product): - You require an account signup, OK. It's a Google only signup, OK step over that. But it did not clearly mention that you this put me on a mailing list and surely 5 minutes after I signup, I get a random e…

Your comment isn’t off putting for the reasons you gave.

Your post feels smugly opinionated. If that wasn’t your intention, I don’t know what to say. Just look at your first two bullets. Passive aggressive and more.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#139

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #137

Today I spent maybe more than an hour tracing a bug that a screen I created turned inaccessible after a merge, tests died suddenly. It turned out to be multiple cases, one was that a colleague changed a default export to a named one which excluded my screen. Another was an in an unrelated test which missed a React context wrapper so I needed to refactor her tests. I don't know what kind of magic debugging tool would…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#140

Post by tiborsaas » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

ryansolid wrote: post #33

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…

> With Replay I was able to shorten that time to about an hour on even the trickiest of bugs.

How exactly? What is it that Replay gives you that you normally wouldn't have?