Erlang/OTP debugger on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard crashes regularly

[Alain O'Dea]

I have installed OTP R14B using http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/.  It
installs 64-bit ERTS and applications, but it doesn't have wxErlang support
because wxMac 2.8 does not build in 64-bit.

When I use the debugger it launches a Wish application that appears to use
native OS X widgets.  However, the debugger is extremely unstable in this
environment.  It worked much better in the X11 wish in 10.5 and earlier.  I
can rarely make it through a debugging session without the Wish application
freezing.

I have successfully restarted debugger by restarting the whole node, but it
rapidly crashes again.  I have also managed to force the monitor application
to restart with exit(im(), 'EXIT').  It seems that it doesn't notice that
wish has crashed.

Is there a reliable way to debug Erlang applications on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow
Leopard?

I am in the process of building a 32-bit OTP dev linked against a 32-bit
wxWidgets 2.8.11.  Hopefully this will work, but I still wonder if ErlIDE
would serve me better for this use case.

IMHO, wxErlang should be a service provided by a C node rather than a
linked-in driver.  To the best of my knowledge that would make 32/64-bit a
non-issue.  This would be similar to the WebKit plug-in solution which
allows 32-bit plug-ins (like Flash) in a 64-bit browser.