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by knuckleheads 615 days ago
Typst is a lot of fun and lets you do some really cool stuff. However! In the process of doing that cool stuff, you may need to debug things and that’s when it’s no longer fun. There is no way to print anything out to console and debug anything about what is going on. People have asked for it for over a year now and the authors have refused/ignored their requests. I would be using it a lot more except for this. https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1669
2 comments
laurmaedje 615 days ago
Hey, I'm one of the Typst devs and author of the issue.

The reason there is no logging yet is because we want to get it _right_ rather than landing a permanent temporary solution. And there were simply more urgent things to do so far.

Also note that if you use an LSP or the web app, you can inspect the live values in your code simply by hovering over them.

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knuckleheads 615 days ago
Thanks for the reply! Happy to consider using typst against once this lands, until then though, I have to use other tools.
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cbolton 615 days ago
The author of this issue is the main developer so I guess they want it done, just had other priorities.

I agree typst needs better debugging tools, but you're a bit harsh. It has things like `repr` that can often be used to inspect objects, and `panic` can be used as a (admittedly crappy) substitute for printing a value to the console.

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knuckleheads 615 days ago
Would you prefer that I not say exactly why I am not using typst right now as I would like to? The debugging experience is jarring compared to everything else and it put me off. I'd like to be using it but for the things that I want to do, I need to be able to figure out the mistakes I was making faster and easier.
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cbolton 615 days ago
Maybe I was a bit harsh too :)

I don't think the debugging experience is worse than in LaTeX (a low bar admittedly): you can print to the console in LaTeX but it's drowned in other messages. Instead of grepping the console in practice I use \show\thing, which is basically the same as doing panic(thing) in typst. What I do is put commented-out "panic(variable)" here and there, and use the comment/uncomment shortcut in the editor to see the value of the variable. With typst's incremental compilation I get immediate feedback, so a better experience than in LaTeX.

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