[CyberDildonics]

I would say that debugging a program live is highly underrated. There is no inherent reason why building a webserver into everything and using html for visualization is the best way to go. Shared memory can be used and be 100-1000 times faster, which can make a huge difference if you want to visualize large amounts of data like point clouds, pixels, etc. as they change.

In your scenario it sounds like an easy way to make a big step forward, though I don't think that takes it far enough.

[VikingCoder]

Well, for one thing, you're presuming the person who wants to inspect something a) has a debugger, b) knows how to use it, c) that the machine running the application allows access through those ports.

[CyberDildonics]

I didn't presume any of those things and I'm not sure where any of those ideas come from. A program can write to shared memory that is read by a separate program. That doesn't take a debugger and it doesn't take 'ports'. I'm actually not sure what you mean by ports.

[VikingCoder]

Sorry, I feel like we're really mis-communicating.

I proposed an idea, and you proceeded to tell me "There is no inherent reason why [my idea] is the best way to go." I think that's a pretty rough way to respond to someone suggesting an idea that might be useful under some circumstances. It's a possibly new tool in your tool-belt. I didn't mean to suggest that a hammer "is the best way to go" for any job. But sometimes the problem is a nail, and a hammer is the best tool.

You highlighted the value of "debugging a program live," which is true, but I thought you meant using a sophisticated debugger (gdb / Visual Studio, etc). For instance, Microsoft Visual Studio has (or used to have) the ability to have plug-ins to help you visualize complex structures in memory of the running process, for instance showing a Bitmap as an actual image on your screen. I thought that's what you meant, or just using gdb or some other sophisticated debugger. But yes, that was my misunderstanding.

Shared memory is nice, and I've used it before, but it required me to store all of my interesting objects in shared memory structures. Which meant changing how my application was written. Yes, sometimes I could see that being amazing. Or I suppose you make a large copy of them.

I've also done the trick where, if I hit a URL on my app, then it took the point clouds, pixels, etc, and provided a rendered PNG image of them. But it could do it without requiring me to restructure my program's memory layout (other than a few multi-threading locks, when needed.) And I've done that over WebSockets, with interactive rendering rates, basically like a VNC. And what was nice about that, again, was that I could run a process on one machine, and debug it (through HTML) from another. And grant that ability to other users, without having to tell them how to install a debugger app, and giving that app access to connect over the network, and etc.

The ports thing was in reference to the ability of Microsoft Visual Studio (and presumably other debuggers) to do remote debugging, attaching themselves to a process running on another computer. So, you have to be able to connect to that process. Whereas my proposal could work on normal HTTP / HTTPS ports, and with authentication, could enable a user to access debug views.

Anyway, yes, I very much agree with you that debugging a program live is highly underrated, and I think it's good if people share different ways to do that.