If there’s an unhandled exception (or even a log message) in your JavaScript, you can click on it in the console and go straight to the source line, set a breakpoint and reload or re-trigger the code, and now you’ve got a fully interactive “stack trace” where you can inspect the values of local variables at all levels of the stack. Or you can set the debugger to automatically break on exceptions, or even to break on events or DOM modifications.
I also can’t stress enough how nice it is to have the debugger integrated into the runtime environment as opposed to an auxiliary debugger like GDB. No need to launch the debugger after my code breaks because it’s already there.
I think web technology has come a long way in the past few years, but a lot of people still seem to hold a grudge against it that I can only imagine they developed in the days of “jQuery all the things”. Are there still problems? Massively yes, but what ecosystem is perfect? I think if you don’t have much recent experience, it can’t hurt to try these things again with an open mind and see if your opinions still hold. I personally don’t have any experience with C# to be able to compare the debugging experience, but compared to Go or C/C++ I think it is massively better.
I think with a good setup including a LSP server for your editor, a good linter, and a type checker, frontend development is actually one of the more enjoyable ways to write code.
Tangential, but the only feature I really miss from browser debuggers is time travel debugging. Mozilla was working on implementing this in the Firefox DevTools as “WebReplay” [0] but it was spun out as a separate project called Replay.io [1] and I haven’t heard much about it since then.
I also can’t stress enough how nice it is to have the debugger integrated into the runtime environment as opposed to an auxiliary debugger like GDB. No need to launch the debugger after my code breaks because it’s already there.
I think web technology has come a long way in the past few years, but a lot of people still seem to hold a grudge against it that I can only imagine they developed in the days of “jQuery all the things”. Are there still problems? Massively yes, but what ecosystem is perfect? I think if you don’t have much recent experience, it can’t hurt to try these things again with an open mind and see if your opinions still hold. I personally don’t have any experience with C# to be able to compare the debugging experience, but compared to Go or C/C++ I think it is massively better.
I think with a good setup including a LSP server for your editor, a good linter, and a type checker, frontend development is actually one of the more enjoyable ways to write code.
Tangential, but the only feature I really miss from browser debuggers is time travel debugging. Mozilla was working on implementing this in the Firefox DevTools as “WebReplay” [0] but it was spun out as a separate project called Replay.io [1] and I haven’t heard much about it since then.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/We...
[1]: https://www.replay.io/