Re: JS debugger on conceptual level

Gijs Kruitbosch wrote:
> Yeah, remote (out-of-process) debugging in Mozilla is not trivial. I am 
> not sure how you'd go about doing it - both Venkman and Firebug are 
> in-process, which makes the process easier in a way. You could probably 
> have part of your app install an add-on that deals with the Firefox 
> interfaces for you, and control that add-on through whatever manner you 
> wish (pipes/COM/screenscraping/local webserver/what-have-you).

I would say this even much stronger: out-of-process debugging is beyond 
  technical feasibility as a practical matter. It would require 
interpreting and manipulating the bit image of the remote process. C 
debuggers do this for C code, it is very difficult. While it has some 
advantages, doing it for the complete mozilla run time is not likely.

I call the thing Gijs describes 'proxied debugging', where the debugger 
UI is in one process talking to server in the debuggee. I guess that 
what Dan is talking about when he says "remote".

I believe some folks are confusing proxied debugging and out-of-process 
debugging, which have different cost/benefits. In particular the so 
called "uncertainty" problem of a runtime with an embedded debugger 
cannot be completely removed in proxied debugging.

jjb