[werat]

> Debuggers need to do more things

It's true that coming up with an interface for an abstract debugger is harder, but it's not impossible. Microsoft created Debug Adapter Protocol (https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol/), which is conceptually similar to LSP. It's not perfect, but covers most basic operations pretty well, while leaving to the debugger to deal with the implementation details.

[jcranmer]

If I'm coming up with a new language, let's call it Drustzig, I can implement the LSP and get support for IDEs (and possibly xref tools and the like) essentially for free. Now to get debugging support for my language... I have to traipse around through every major debugger and beg them to merge Drustzig patches to make it work.

The protocol you've linked (or the similar gdbserver protocol) essentially implements an IDE <-> debugger mapping. Well, most of one: everything is basically being passed as strings, so if you want smart stuff, you kind of have to build in the smart stuff yourself. It doesn't help the other parts of the process; if you want to build a new gdb, you have to do all the parsing of debug info for C, C++, Drustzig, etc. yourself... and you have to integrate the compiler expression stuff yourself. If you want to build a better time-traveling debugger, or a better crash debug format, or something similar, well, the gdb remote protocol lets gdb talk to your tool so all you have to implement is essentially low-level program state (e.g., enumerate registers of a thread, read/write arbitrary memory locations, etc.). But this isn't covered by the thing you've listed either, and it still relies on the debugger supporting a particular protocol.

[werat]

I agree that language server and debugger are different beasts, but both LSP and DAP serve a purpose of re-using the same server (xrefs or debugger) with different IDEs.

> I can implement the LSP and get support for IDEs essentially for free I mean, technically same is true for DAP... You can implement DAP and get support for IDE for free. But I agree that in general case implementing a good debugger is harder than implementing a good language server.

If Drustzig requires a special debugger (e.g. because it uses acustom format of debug information), then you'd need to implement it, yes. However, existing debuggers can support new languages relatively easy if those follow standard conventions (e.g. use PDB and DWARF). For example, Rust support in LLDB basically comes down to a custom demangler.

Again, I'm not saying that DAP is perfect and solves debugging, but IMO it's a step in the right direction. Make it popular, make it extensible. Debuggers can be mostly language agnostic (within reasonable bounds), but they don't _have_ to be.