[Question] How does this compare to node-inspector? about devtool HOT 12 CLOSED

👍 same question here

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Node inspector opens in browser via HTTP, and this one uses Electron, which is much faster.

But there's also iron-node, which is Electron-based too...

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I know node-inspector allows you to pause execution on the first line which is really handy if you want to step through some code that you might not want to edit. iron-node doesn't have that yet. Would be super cool if this could pull that off 🙏

Dont think node-inspector has the REPL features this does. Its a long time since i used it though because it wasnt working (for me at least) for a while there.

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I know node-inspector allows you to pause execution on the first line (...). iron-node doesn't have that yet.

See s-a/iron-node#35.

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ah - thanks. For some reason i thought i tried that and it didnt work.

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I hadn't seen iron-node when I was developing this, and it seems to tackle the problem in a similar way.

Some features that make devtool a little unique:

• this is a bit more focused on command-line use and Unix-style piping/redirection (stdout/stdin)
• this embraces and promotes the Browser/Electron APIs – see the StreetView example which renders a <canvas> to a PNG buffer, then writes the buffer to process.stdout
• the require hooks are modified to provide features that Electron (and iron-node) do not currently support, like:
  • source maps for files in the sources panel
  • more detailed syntax error messages
  • optional "browser" field resolution

node-inspector is built on a completely different architecture (Chrome Remote Debugging Protocol, if I understand correctly). It has its own set of pros (like native addons and a true node environment) and cons (poor GUI experience, limited set of Chrome features, can't just reload the page, etc).

I will do a more detailed comparison today and add it to the readme. 😄

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@mattdesl Thanks for the explanation. Adding this comparison to readme would be great so visitors can find this information right away.

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@mattdesl and @s-a, would you consider joining your efforts to create the ultimate debugger for Node? :D I think this could be a huge benefit for the Node community.

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@mattdesl 👍 great comparison

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@mik01aj Once some stuff here stabilizes, I will try to split it out into separate modules so that iron-node (and any other potential tools) could take advantage of it.

I think it's best to keep these projects separate since they both tackle the problem in different ways, and allow for different use cases.

I can't actually get node-inspector to work right now (even just a "Hello World") so I'm having a hard time getting a feel for it. Last time I tried it, the GUI experience was clunky, things would crash often and features like profiling did not work like they do in regular Chrome. I suspect some of these things have been fixed since then, but I can't really be sure until I give it another go. 😄

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Ok, added to readme.
https://github.com/Jam3/devtool#see-also--comparisons

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Yeah my experiences with node-inspector have been more miss than hit - for a long time it was very much broken though i did get it to work recently.

Thats why I'm pretty excited about this project - a great debugger and a great REPL are two things that have really been missing in Node IMO.

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