[kbenson]

I don't think that's quite it, at least not entirely. They were complaining about how everything they found on how to diagnose and inspect the problem started with downloading a third party tool.

I read this as a complaint that React doesn't provide information on what's going on that you can see and inspect (whether true or not). The equivalent for Postgres would be if they didn't document their protocol and instead referred you to a special debugger they provided, and you had to rely on that instead, making use of gdb or the equivalent much more complicated.

[nicoburns]

Except the React devtools extension is a first-party tool maintained by the React team [0]. They don't distribute with the library, but given that it's a browser extension there's not really any way that they could.

Also, the react dev tools aren't really a debugger. There's no way to step through code or similar. It just provides an insight into React's internal state (the component tree, and any state contained within it). The equivalent would be Postgres providing a tool to inspect the contents of its caches or indexes, and the OP complaining that they can't read them when using GDB.

[0]: https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/08/15/new-react-devtools.html

[kbenson]

> React devtools extension is a first-party tool maintained by the React team

Which makes my example more accurate barring two words...

> Also, the react dev tools aren't really a debugger.

All it takes to be a debugger is to provide additional info about a running process. Insight into React's internal state definitely qualifies IMO. Even if you think it doesn't quite qualify, Chrome Devtools are a debugger, and whether something that extends it to give better info is a debugger or an extension for a dubber is missing the forest for the trees.

That said, I'm not necessarily agreeing with the original premise, since I don't know how hard React is to introspect at this point (I know in the past some websites purposefully made it very hard on purpose). I'm just not sure the original comment's point of view can be boiled down to whether someone is familiar with the technology or not (and part of the reason I'm not sure might be lack of knowledge).