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I made a debugger that draws the state machine of the program

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Re: I made a debugger that draws the state machine of the program

#11
post #3

That is absolutely awesome. I used to have something like this: a pair of very fast dacs hooked up to the 16 address lines of my computer and another dac hooked up to the databus. It allowed me to look straight into the memory of the machine as the processor was accessing it, quite a powerful tool. Yours is nicer though (and with todays memory size I'd hate to think about the quantity of data that passes in a split s…

That reminds me of the old story of people having a audio speaker connected to the address but of their mainframe so they could detect error conditions by the sounds being made.

Re: I made a debugger that draws the state machine of the program

#15
post #7
post #3

That is absolutely awesome. I used to have something like this: a pair of very fast dacs hooked up to the 16 address lines of my computer and another dac hooked up to the databus. It allowed me to look straight into the memory of the machine as the processor was accessing it, quite a powerful tool. Yours is nicer though (and with todays memory size I'd hate to think about the quantity of data that passes in a split s…

What did they drive?

X, Y, brightness on an army surplus scope.

Re: I made a debugger that draws the state machine of the program

#17
post #8

Here's one for Python. http://pythontutor.com/ It shows the variables, and allows you to step forward and backward. Great for explaining programming to new people who haven't grokked computing yet.

Apple Swift and Unreal Engine Blueprint both have amazing state visualization tools built in. See: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/images/Engine/Blueprint...

I think a deep visual debugging tools are going to be 'built in' in future in much the same way that HTTP primitives were recently with node and string manipulation was with Python 2.

Re: I made a debugger that draws the state machine of the program

#18

How did you get your terminal to look like that?

The font looks like Terminus. The background transparency effect and hidden scrollbars can be set-up with most terminals, this one is probably urxvt. As for the borderless/undecorated window, that's probably done via the Window Manager. DWM[0] for example doesn't paint window decorations but there's usually a way to set this up in Gnome/Unity/KDE/etc as well.

[0] http://dwm.suckless.org

Re: I made a debugger that draws the state machine of the program

#20
post #17
post #8

Here's one for Python. http://pythontutor.com/ It shows the variables, and allows you to step forward and backward. Great for explaining programming to new people who haven't grokked computing yet.

Apple Swift and Unreal Engine Blueprint both have amazing state visualization tools built in. See: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/images/Engine/Blueprint... I think a deep visual debugging tools are going to be 'built in' in future in much the same way that HTTP primitives were recently with node and string manipulation was with Python 2.

There used to be an IDE called "Together" that supported bi-directional transformation between source code and diagrams.

Although it sounded like a really cool idea, it didn't take off. Seems text is best (maybe because it supports incompatible hierarchies better).

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