Conditional breakpoints

[grammati]

Not entirely ready, but I would like to get some more eyes on this and see whether others agree with the approach.

The feature is conditional breakpoints - that is, breakpoints that will only enter the debugger when an expression is truthy.

Conditions are attached to forms as :break/when metadata. Example:

(for [i (range 3)]
  #dbg ^{:break/when (odd? i)
  (inc i))

Evaluating this, you will stop in the debugger only once, when i is 1.

However, the primary use case (at least for me) is likely to be instrumenting a function with a conditional breakpoint. I have implemented this in cider as C-u C-u C-M-x, which prompts for an expression. This can be an expression of the function arguments. The form is then sent to cider-nrepl with #dbg ^{:break/when (the expression)} prefixed.

Making this work required a slightly hairy special-case that moves :break/when metadata down from the defn form and onto the forms inside the body of the macroexpanded function.

To get some confidence that I have the slightest idea what I'm doing, I wrote a bunch of new tests, in a new test namespace. These interact with cider-nrepl only by sending and receiving nrepl messages, just as a client (i.e. emacs) would.

Thanks everyone, please let me know what you think.

[Malabarba]

Wow. First of all, thanks a ton! :-)
This is a feature that's been requested several times already, so it's very welcome.
Also, thanks so much for writing so many tests! :-)

I'll make some comments directly in the code, but overall I like how you've implemented it.

[Malabarba]

I'm fine with this change, but I'd rather leave it to a separate commit (unless it has some relation to this feature).

[grammati]

I pushed a PR for a rudimentary version of the front-end portion, here: clojure-emacs/cider#1591

[Malabarba]

Do we need :deeper? Isn't that the same as skipping everything inside this binding?

[grammati]

My thinking at the time was that if the "skipped" form calls another function which is instrumented, we do want to stop in the debugger, and that using :all would prevent that. I can add some test cases to verify.

[Malabarba]

Good point!
And yes, a test case would be nice.

[grammati]

@Malabarba, I pushed a commit that addresses all your comments, I think.

I pared back the functionality to be just the basic conditional break. I removed the special-casing of defns that moved the condition down into the body of the fn. I can re-introduce that in another PR, where we can discuss the best interface.

I also added a few more tests, including one (unrelated to conditional breakpoints) that I think should pass but does not. Can you have a look at call-instrumented-fn-when-stepping-out? Perhaps my expectations of how the debugger should behave are just wrong.

Thanks!

[Malabarba]

Ok, thanks! I'll have a look at the tests when I get a chance. 👍

[grammati]

I rebased this onto master and pushed again

[Malabarba]

Ok. Looks like your tests are good. The only 2 failures are the cljs tests which are also failing on master. I've also tested your code locally and it seems to work well.
I'm going to give this a final read and merge. 👍

[Malabarba]

Ok. This should now be on clojar.
Thanks again for the feature and specially for the tests. :-)