[haXe] Debugger Request.

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> Hi There,
> 
> I am just work back with Flash because some Libraries that I use are not 
> haxefied yet. But anyway: I thought about debugging in another 
> environment. I mean: theoretically haXe could add for debugging 
> "breakpoint" functions after each call that can "pause" the execution 
> ... It would be a lot slower but at least usable with javascript etc. 
> too... Might be a bit tricky but worth a try ... at least since I hope 
> to finally switch all my daily work to haXe I would love to see a 
> debugger for all environments available for haXe.
> 
> yours
> Martin.

I have no immediate plans for a debugger, however here are the 
feasability by platform :

- on Neko, things are pretty simple. A specific version of the VM could 
be built that connects to a remote debugger and send informations about 
stack and globals. Not so much changes needed.

- in Flash, now that the Flash Debug Player is freely available for 
download as part of the Flex2 SDK, it would be interesting to resume the 
work made on OFD (http://osflash.org/ofd). If someone can come up with a 
working prototype of an OS Flash9 debugger then I will add SWD output to 
haXe (btw is there flash9 swd ??)

- in JS this is pretty hackish, since to "break" the program execution, 
the only possibility is to perform a synchronous HTTP request. I have an 
idea on how that could be done but this also require some important work.

The value of a debugger decrease partly of the quality of exceptions 
reports you get. Now that both Flash9 and Neko can get complete stack 
trace on exceptions, with planned supported for Flash<=8 and JS as well, 
the amount of work needed to develop a debugger does not match its 
usefulness. I personnaly prefer to focus on other important things, but 
if some skilled people are interested in working on this, I can give 
more informations about how to get it done.

Nicolas