Rexbug - Elixir wrapper for :redbug tracing debugger

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Rexbug is the Elixir wrapper for the :redbug Erlang tracing debugger. Redbug has been around forever and it has some nice features (it is production safe, simple and pretty powerful), but it was a bit of a pain to use from Elixir. I set off to fix that with Rexbug and yesterday I released 1.0.0 with all the features I had originally planned :tada::tada::tada:

Let me know if you have any questions :slight_smile:

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Hey, I’m back to being involved in Elixir after a couple of years of doing other things in another project and I’m happy to see rexbug is still getting plenty of downloads despite just yearly bugfix releases.

I would like it if rexbug remained a relevant and convenient tool in the future, so I’d like to focus on building a 2.0 release and commit some time to maintenance afterwards.

Which is why I’d like to ask you guys for some thoughts on on rexbug, its utility and where you see it going in the future. I know there have been so projects to expand its functionality, such as rexerbug and replbug and there’s good arguments for introducing their functionality to rexbug as such.

Here’s where my head is at right now:

Critical stuff for 2.0 release:

  • migrate to redbug 2.x
  • make sure rexbug compiles with compilation or credo warnings on Elixir/Erlang latest
    • (still target the widest reasonable range of Elixir/Erlang versions)
  • add the capability for matching on map fields

Long term 2.x wishlist

  • The ability to pass captured functions instead of magic strings for easier use in the shell (inspired by rexerbug and dbg.
  • the ability to save the tracing results to a repl variable, like in replbug
  • ability to run tracing on the whole cluster
  • some form of pretty printing for the trace results

Of course the items from the second list differ in the amount of work required to make them work and how well specified the functionality is - will need some prioritization.

CTA: Please let us know how you use rexbug and what aspects of it would provide the most value! I have been out of the loop for a while and feedback from real users would be very valuable :slight_smile:

also: my apologies to people who opened issues/PRs on the project in the last couple of years and didn’t get much of a response - hopefully I can do better from now on and we can work on the project together :slight_smile:

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Update:

The work on rexbug v2 is going well. Here’s the changes so far:

  • improved CI, moved to GitHub Actions
  • updated redbug dependency to 2.x, seems to be working great
  • added support for matching on structs
  • added support for matching on list heads ([h | _t], [h1, h2 | _t])
  • added support for redbug 2 functionalities
  • increased the test coverage back to 95%+
  • No compilation or credo warnings

I’m hoping to release the 2.0.0-rc1 version on hex within a week’s time. If anyone wants to help with testing it to make sure 2.0.0 can be released safely, I’d really appreciate it. Tagging @binarytemple - he’s the most involved power-user of Rexbug I know :smiley:

I’d like to start working on 2.1 immediately after releasing 2.0. I’m thinking the main feature for that would be the ability pass functions to the tracing (via captured functions or macros, I still need to see the which approach would work best), instead of magic strings. I think it would be a big win for the usability of the tool - we’ll be able to use iex shell completion instead of manually making sure everything is spelled right.

When that comes I hope to solicit some feedback for the proposed API to make sure it’s useful to you guys.

As always - feedback very much welcome.

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More than happy to help out, great library! Sorry I haven’t been more of an active contributor.

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Rexbug 2.0.0-rc1 is out!

Notable changes:

  • Update to redbug 2.0
  • Support for matching on structs
  • Add Rexbug.dtop/1
  • Improve guard functions support
  • Improve matching on lists
  • Reach 96% test coverage
  • Fix print_re option handling
  • Remove mix_test_watch and make from formal package dependencies
  • Add the scripts/release.sh tool

I’ll dogfood the rc-1 for a couple of weeks and release it as v2.0.0. All help testing the release candidate appreciated!

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Debugging is always important and I’m glad knowing that a tracing tool is available improving a lot the debugging experience which for me have been sprinkling IO.puts/2 calls here and there.