Molly Rocket
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2024
20:00 · 70K views · May 17, 2022
Casey Muratori gives a fast tour of the RemedyBG debugger for Windows, which he uses daily. He shows its speed and features, especially the watch window.
HN points to it as a demonstration of what fast, well-built developer tooling looks like and of why a debugger beats print statements.
5 comments from Hacker News
A debugger like RemedyBG, but for linux and macos. Bonus points if you could use it for all the things, including but not limited to: WASM, javascript, android, and iOS. To clarify: I use Vim as a text editor. I use it for all of my programming editor needs no matter what I'm making. I also make a large variety of things because I'm a consultant. Vim has never let me down as far as being able to intelligently edit everything from React to assembly and everything in between on every desktop OS. I'd like a debugger that is suitably small, fast and flexible. [LINK] Here's Casey Muratori demonstrating all the way in which RemedyBG rocks. this video
Anyone frustrated with debuggers, check out RemedyBG [LINK] Insanely fast and capable debugger for Windows. this video (I have no relation to the project, just think it's great)
The watch windows are vastly inferior in the kinds of formatted information they can very quickly show, as the program is stepped through. Take a look at "Twenty Minutes of Reasons to Use the RemedyBG Debugger": this video Haven't tried the Qt or KDE or Jetbrains environments in about 3 years, but last I did, they were much like Visual Studio -- slow, odd latency in displaying formatted values as you step through, lack of easy ways to format data in a human readable way in the watch window. To be clear, when I say "slow", I mean the GUI is slow, not the underlying debugger, which I presume is plenty fast.
>What’s an example of a fast debugger? My apologies in advance if this feels like a gotcha, but… Casey ended up swapping to RemedyBG for debugging. He made a video about why. From about 0:50 onwards he talks about the speed and feature set of the watch window this video Also, I don’t mean to be rude by ignoring all the questions you posed; they’re good questions, I just don’t have answers for them (I would hope the developers whose full-time job it is to build debuggers would , though).
> I start Visual Studio, which doesn't feel faster than Electron Well...Visual Studio is a part of the horribly written software collection. Here's an example of actually good software: this video