Ruby debugger in 1.9.3

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:29:41 -0500

I decided to really dig into Ruby and its ecosystem. It’s quick to get things started using RVM and the language is fun (and for what it’s worth, on my system Ruby 1.9.3 is slightly faster than Perl 5.12 on my favorite trivial string parsing test of extracting fields from 500,000 lines of Apache combined log) but coming from Python and Perl I find frustrating quirks in the tools. Today’s example is that the debugger is broken on 1.9.x and searching turns up hundreds of “fixes” that don’t work or only build for specific releases of ruby and the dependencies. I realize it isn’t “core”— there is a debug module in the 1.9.3 stdlib that is kind of undocumented— but it is the sort of thing you expect to work or get flagged as broken. It seems that the authors/maintainers of the debugger gave up on it, but Gabriel Horner has a fork that works.

Ruby 1.9.3 on YAPH

Ruby debugger in 1.9.3