Dispelling the Dark Magic: Inside a Ruby Debugger (RubyConf 2017)

On November 16, 2017, I spoke on "Dispelling the Dark Magic: Inside a Ruby Debugger" at RubyConf in New Orleans, LA. The talk demonstrated how to implement a simple debugger for Ruby applications, and covered some of the techniques used in the implementation of the Stackdriver Debugger for Ruby.

This is a list of links to code and resources related to the talk.

Update: The video is now online.

Talk resources

• Video on Confreaks
• Slides on SpeakerDeck
• The code we wrote is on Github.

Debuggers

• Byebug is a traditional command-line based debugger for Ruby 2.
• Stackdriver Debugger is a debugger for live web applications. You can also find:
  • The Ruby code on Github.
  • The design doc written by the Google engineer who implemented most of it.
• There is also a (somewhat more primitive) debug class in the standard library.