Difference between this and node-inspector

[amcdnl]

It would be nice to know what the difference between this and Node Inspector is. I can tell some UI differences at first glance.

[jkrems]

TL;DR: It's roughly the same but node-inspector is more stable & has an actual company backing it. From a user perspective, it's roughly the same.

Features

bugger

• chrome://inspect support
• More detailed network timings
• True repl in console, including support for require
• Support for child_process#fork / workers

node-inspector

• Preloading files
• Remote debugging without having to be installed on the remote host
• Support for saving files when they were live-edited (bugger assumes you'd just use the workspace feature, so this isn't really a feature bugger lacks)

Random Notes

• node-inspector is widely used and has some sort of test coverage; neither is really true for bugger
• node-inspector uses a forked version of the DevTools UI, bugger just implements the protocol and uses the "official" UI that is part of Chrome
• node-inspector runs in a separate process (possibly even on a separate machine) and uses the V8 debug protocol; bugger runs as part of the app and uses an IO thread to dispatch messages
  • node-inspector supports remote debugging of a "vanilla" node process
  • bugger is not constraint by the V8 debug protocol (which Chrome itself stopped using)
• node-inspector cares about good support for older node versions, bugger supports node 4 and pretty much nothing else at this point.

Hope this clears things up. :)

[amcdnl]

Thanks for the feedback! So what was the motivation for you to create this over use node-inspector?

[jkrems]

Short answer: Understanding how Chrome's debugger and V8 internals work. Also, I wanted a clean implementation of the devtools protocol for node so that I could use it as a backend for debug bindings in editors that would work for both remotely debugging in Chrome and node. node-inspector bundling UI and node bindings into one is great if you want to use the devtools UI. Not so great if you want to develop an atom.io or VSCode plugin.

[amcdnl]

Ah, I wondered why no one had embedded node inspector into a IDE plugin. Look forward to seeing yours ;)