[erlang-questions] Erlang/OTP debugger on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard crashes regularly

[Dan Gudmundsson]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 6:32 PM, Alain O'Dea <alain.odea@REDACTED> wrote:
> 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.
>

The wxWidgets team is working on that for 3.0.

> 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.
>

GS uses the wish from the path, if you put X11 variant first in path
that should work.

> 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.
>

2.8.11 is needed on Snow leopard, so it's a good choice, but wx on the mac is
still the least tested variant..

If ErlIDE is working for you, it might be a good choice.

> 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.

Agree, that wouldn't bring down the node if it crashes either,
it is doable but I beleive there is a large time investment before
that happens,
which I don't have time to do.
But that would be great for linux and windows as well.

/Dan