My bad, I mean source-level debugger. Something that allows you to step through forms as they are in the source, unexpanded and not decompiled. It should allow jumping to a line or over an expression, continuing to a point, seamlessly stepping into subroutines, and stepping out of expressions. It would be nice to have single-activation and conditional breakpoints. Variables in the executed portion of the code should be annotated with their values. Sometimes watchers - forms auto-evalled in each frame - are helpful, though these are implemented in some CLs, IIRC. SLY's stickers are close, but they are gathered during execution and replayed later, so the break-edit-recompile-redo workflow doesn't work with them. My experience debugging CL using SBCL and SLIME reminds me of debugging CoffeeScript in a browser before source maps were a thing... It's still 100% doable, just less convenient.
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My bad, I mean source-level debugger. Something that allows you to step through forms as they are in the source, unexpanded and not decompiled. It should allow jumping to a line or over an expression, continuing to a point, seamlessly stepping into subroutines, and stepping out of expressions. It would be nice to have single-activation and conditional breakpoints. Variables in the executed portion of the code should be annotated with their values. Sometimes watchers - forms auto-evalled in each frame - are helpful, though these are implemented in some CLs, IIRC. SLY's stickers are close, but they are gathered during execution and replayed later, so the break-edit-recompile-redo workflow doesn't work with them. My experience debugging CL using SBCL and SLIME reminds me of debugging CoffeeScript in a browser before source maps were a thing... It's still 100% doable, just less convenient.