Re: Edebug: avoid messages on 'f' command

[Paul Pogonyshev]

On 9 May 2016 at 15:55, Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> wrote:
> FWIW, I use Edebug quite often and I don't consider its usability bad -
> quite the opposite.

I recently submitted a bunch of feature requests for specific things
that can be improved. 6 or 7 just about breakpoints. I also see a lot
of problems with it that I have no idea how to improve at all.

For example, how do you check value of a variable in non-current scope
of execution?

What to do if you have 20 levels of nested lists/vectors of 100
elements each and backtrace buffers or even "Result: ..." message
simply take forever to display?

It's annoying that the debugger cannot debug without instrumenting
first. When I debug Java or JavaScript code at work, I don't have to
think if I instrumented all the functions I _potentially_ might want
to debug in advance, I just set a breakpoint and continue with step in
/ step over commands from it. With Edebug you can in principle
instrument not-yet-evaluated forms, but you have no way of stepping
out if the caller was not instrumented. And SPC result depends on
something you don't easily see: whether the function was instrumented
(then it works as "step in") or not ("step over").

It is frustratingly difficult to find the caller chain from backtrace
buffer, especially if complicated macros are involved.

Paul