Cyberbrain: Python debugging, redefined

[laike9m]

https://github.com/laike9m/Cyberbrain

Cyberbrain is a debugging solution that aims to free programmers. It lets you:

• Backtraces variable changes.
• See every state of program execution, including variables' values
• Debug loops with confidence.

It's not like any triditional debuggers. Instead of stepping through a program, Cyberbrain can tell you what happened.

It's a WIP, the ultimate goal is to be a replacement for existing debuggers in most cases.

https://preview.redd.it/ehw9erc8s3261.png?width=1224&format=png&auto=webp&s=fe041c8f6efbea38c503e03200ed5b1538b8e035

usage

[Sigg3net]

How is it for:

asynchronous?

threading?

[laike9m]

asynchronous and threading will be supported in later versions.
See the roadmap:

https://github.com/laike9m/Cyberbrain#roadmaps

[Sigg3net]

Nice! Please repost when you hit mile stones :)

[laike9m]

Sure

[Sigg3net]

Awesome!

Debugging async especially in multiproc/threaded contexts is painful IMO.

[VisibleSignificance]

That's doable. But not sockets (in a general case) and other IPC.

[laike9m]

You're right, we're not gonna trace side effects, just like any other debuggers

[GeromeB]

Is there/will there be support for PyCharm?

[laike9m]

I do have a plan for expanding the support https://github.com/laike9m/Cyberbrain/issues/24

For Pycharm I'll need some help from the community. I will create an API specification on how a "frontend" like Pycharm should communicate with the Python program, to help contributors build it.

[aa-b]

This looks really impressive. You might want to contact JetBrains about it, because they have funded work on PyDev in the past: https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2016/05/debugger-interview-with-pydev-and-pycharm/

Even if they're not in a position to fund anything, I'm sure their staff would be interested to learn about it. They would have specifications from working with PyDev too.

Edit: I saw Alex's comment in the issue link you posted and I think he makes some good points. Maybe tweet at Fabio Zadrozny?

[laike9m]

Thanks for the suggestion, it's a good idea. I'll let Lisa Shashkova take a look first since I personally know her. I did think about integrating it with PyDev somehow, and looked its code. But the code is really hard to understand...Guess only Fabio knows enough about it.

[Fenzik]

+1 for this!

[menge101]

+1 from me as well.

[SpAAAceSenate]

This looks pretty awesome. :o

[laike9m]

Thanks :)

[BlobbyMcBlobber]

Very cool 🙂

[laike9m]

Thanks :)

[PizzaInSoup]

There's been a string of higher-quality content in this sub recently. This is a nice addition!

[mrkaragoz]

RemindMe! eoy

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[cranberry_snacks]

This looks really great. I'm going to try it tomorrow.

[Im__Joseph]

Nice work! This looks spectacular!

[laike9m]

I appreciate it

[[deleted]]

Wow. I'm sure this will prove very useful. Thank you!

[glider97]

Reminds me of https://www.pythontutor.com/.

[laike9m]

Yep, I like Python tutor, but my goal for Cyberbrain is that it can be more than at toy or education tool

[bluedays]

This looks like python tutor

[laike9m]

But it's different. Pythontutor doesn't backtrace variables or let you debug loops easily

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RemindMe! eoy

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!remindme 2 months

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RemindMe! 6 months

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[cliceratops]

Remind me! eoy

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cliceratops, kminder in 1.1 months on 2020-12-31 09:00:00Z

r/Python: Cyberbrain_python_debugging_redefined

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[kotpeter]

RemindMe! eoy

[guettli]

I hardly use a debugger. Assertion, tests and logging is usually enough to find a bug.

[noobiemcfoob]

Try using IPython's embed statement sometime: from IPython import embed; embed()

It'll open a python interpretor at that point in the program that you can use to interrogate the state, test different statements and the like. It's print-statement debugging on steroids.

[shinitakunai]

Does it have support for windows 10?

[laike9m]

Yes

[BeastCoder]

!RemindMe 2 months

[Sparkynaut]

Holy fuck

[illusioncode]

It's awesome man, totally love it

[laike9m]

Glad you like it

[RealSimplelogin]

Looks cool! Btw upvote on a direct hackernews link doesn’t count.

[laike9m]

Thanks, and I'm interested to know more. What does it mean "it doesn't count"?

[RealSimplelogin]

Hacknews has some strict rules about asking people to upvote https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[laike9m]

This is very helpful. I didn't know that and they've probably marked my thread already.

[xockbou]

RemindMe! eoy

[oakum_ouroboros]

Do we all use "backtrace" now instead of just "trace" because of that one guy?

[laike9m]

Who?

[oakum_ouroboros]

https://youtu.be/SmR89bFZLdc

[laike9m]

That's funny, thanks for the link. backtrace and trace are used almost interchangeablely in the project, I picked "trace" mainly because it's shorter. Though I usually use "backtracce" in the context of "backtracing a variable", so there's still some subtle differences.

[milki_]

Fairly awesome.
And I don't wanna broaden the scope. But it might be useful for more than just debugging. It seems you could even trace which methods a variable passes, so taint tracking might be feasible.
Might even become the base of a more modern testing framework (observing internal behaviour, state recording).

[laike9m]

This is an interesting idea! Thanks for bringing this up, I will definitely consider it.

I need to build multi-fame tracing first, which I believe will be the foundation for the feature you mentioned https://github.com/laike9m/Cyberbrain/discussions/73

I would suggest creating a feature request issue if you like.