FireDBG – A Time Travel Visual Debugger for Rust

[steady geyser]

https://firedbg.sea-ql.org/blog/2023-12-12-introducing-firedbg/

[toxic coyote]

This looks really interesting

[steady geyser]

We’ve been working on this debugger just about a year now. Time travel debugging isn’t a new concept, the new idea here is to use call tree visualisation to help us navigate the debug trace.

It supports various Linux distros on x64 and macOS on x64 and M1. It’s only available for Rust right now, but we do want to bring this debugging experience to other programming languages. Please give it a try! Would love to know your thoughts.

[toxic coyote]

I'm afraid I can't get it to work. The farthest I got was it complaining that my builds are optimised (which they are not)

[steady geyser]

https://firedbg.sea-ql.org/blog/2023-12-13-getting-started/

Maybe try and download the Testbench?

[toxic coyote]

followed that. it runs, it just doesn't work

warning: day11 was compiled with optimization - stepping may behave oddly; variables may not be available.
I get this and an empty ss file

[steady geyser]

The warning message is expected

FireDBG installed with self-tests all pass?

[toxic coyote]

Yes

[steady geyser]

Hmmmm this is odd

[toxic coyote]

It does with in the testbench, but not in my projects

[steady geyser]

Oh okay

I see

Did your own project contains async?

[toxic coyote]

No async

[steady geyser]

Is it a binary, example, unit test or integration test?

[toxic coyote]

A binary

[steady geyser]

Try executing RUST_LOG=trace firedbg run <BINARY>, it should show all the breakpoints info etc

Any breakpoints?

[toxic coyote]

not that I can tell

I'll push the branch i mutilated for this so you can have a go and see if there's something weird

(mutilated because most of the code was on nightly, which you don't have a build for)

https://github.com/conradludgate/adventofcode2023/tree/firedbg spoilers for aoc within

[rotund dome]

looks cool!
it doesn't have a license, what are you planning here?

[toxic coyote]

I gotta go, don't have time to debug further, but I really like the idea and best of luck in the future

[steady geyser]

Thanks!! Appreciated the help

We will get back to you

[amber fulcrum]

woooo amazing stuff!

[fickle gate]

This looks really interesting, I'm curious to see how far this can be pushed

[edgy hawk]

That's really impressive, I will try it later today. Just a quick question, it only works for VS Code? @steady geyser

[steady geyser]

Hey @toxic coyote, thanks for helping! We found a small bug.
https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust/pull/5

https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust/assets/30400950/9608455a-2e1c-4032-a619-3f2aadf386f3

[toxic coyote]

Aha! Yay 😄

[steady geyser]

Hey @edgy hawk, you can use the CLI to drive the debugger. But you need the VS Code extension to view the graphics.

[steady geyser]

Hey @rotund dome,

It's licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0
  (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license
  (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

[steady geyser]

Hey @fickle gate, try it and let us know what you think :)

[steady geyser]

Hey @toxic coyote, you can now download FireDBG 1.74.1 and try again!

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust/main/install.sh -sSf | sh

[amber fulcrum]

Are there any plans to have FireDBG work with Windows using ETW or dtrace, both of which flamegraph can use?

[rotund dome]

awesome, thanks!

[toxic coyote]

Thanks, it worked. I used it to debug an optimisation I wanted to implement for today's AoC and it made it very easy to understand a panic I was hitting

[whole depot]

couldnt make it work on windows, its very problematic

[steady geyser]

Nice!! Glad to help :)

Hey @toxic coyote , I wonder what is the license of https://github.com/conradludgate/adventofcode2023 ?
Can the FireDBG team adapt it as test case? We will attribute the original work accordingly.

[steady geyser]

Hey @whole depot, can you elaborate? For Windows, you need to install the FireDBG in WSL 2 of Ubuntu 22.04 / Ubuntu 20.04

[toxic coyote]

The code I will license as MIT, but the project binary and tests relies on the AoC input which is not mine to give a license for

[whole depot]

it complains that theres no rust installed

[steady geyser]

The rustc command isn't in system path?

[whole depot]

it is in PATH on windows but for some reason wsl cant see it

[steady geyser]

You should install Rust inside WSL 2

[rotund dome]

WSL is entirely separate from windows in that way

[steady geyser]

Yes

that's why the install script compliant Rust is missing

[amber fulcrum]

Shame I can't really use WSL2 at work

[whole depot]

i still cant make it work, i installed successfully on wsl2 but vscode still cant see it i guess because it's only on the wsl side and clicking "install firedbg cli" on windows doesn't work because it tries to install from windows terminal

[steady geyser]

U need to remote into WSL2 on your vscode

[whole depot]

making some progress, now im stuck here, there's no option here shown in the guide

[steady geyser]

Hey @whole depot, check this https://firedbg.sea-ql.org/blog/2023-12-13-getting-started/#debug-targets-and-runs You should see the FIREDBG and FIREDBG RUNS panel at the bottom

[whole depot]

i see them but they are empty

am i stupid or is this really that difficult to set up lol

[lost oasis]

Does this support windows?

[wary agate]

i cannot get this to work. too complicated

[dense rose]

This looks like a recolor of the seaorm logo 🤨

[toxic coyote]

it's almost as if it's from the same project

[dense rose]

How would a debugger be the same project as a database ORM?

[toxic coyote]

check the organisation: https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust