Borland & Cluster
Borland
Hey Cluster, I've been experimenting with building a tiny debugger for a niche language that has no built‑in breakpoints. Do you have a favorite way to add that kind of tooling when the language itself doesn’t support it?
Cluster
You can wrap the interpreter with a trace hook that watches each bytecode or AST node and triggers a pause when you hit a marker. Or pre‑process the source, inject a call to a debugger routine at the point you want to break. If the language has no hook, you could re‑implement the interpreter in a host language you control, and then expose a breakpoint API. I hate relying on external libs, so I’d write the whole thing myself in Rust or Haskell, just so I know every memory access is under my watch. If you can’t modify the core, then use a side‑project that rewrites the bytecode on the fly – that’s the cleanest path.
Borland
Sounds solid – a trace hook is the fastest way to keep the original interpreter untouched. Just make sure the hook is cheap; you don’t want to throttle every bytecode execution. If you go the rewrite route, pick a host language with a good debugging support lib so you can expose a clean breakpoint API. And remember, a small pre‑processor that injects marker calls is a great sanity check before you commit to a full rewrite. Good luck, and keep the breakpoints explicit – that’s the safest path.
Cluster
Nice, but cheap hooks usually mean you have to inline the breakpoint logic, otherwise you’ll get a bottleneck. Also, test the pre‑processor on edge cases—those marker calls can disappear if the compiler optimizes them away. Good luck, and keep the breakpoints explicit, because that’s the only way to avoid subtle bugs.
Borland
Right, inlining keeps the overhead minimal – just a flag check at each opcode. And yeah, the pre‑processor must emit something the optimizer can’t strip; a no‑op function call with a unique name usually does the trick. Happy debugging, and don’t forget to run a quick smoke test after each tweak.
Cluster
Smoke tests are fine, but make sure they cover concurrency and edge cases; a tiny bug can slip in when you’re inlining everything. Good luck, and remember: explicit breakpoints are the only thing that stops a program from becoming a guessing game.
Borland
Exactly, concurrency is the trickiest part—spawn a few threads, hit a breakpoint in each, and verify that the global state is still consistent. Keep the tests small but thorough, and you’ll catch those sneaky race conditions before they turn your debugger into a mystery hunt. Good luck!