GUI based internals debugger

[paultag]

Allow for a curses base debugger that allows debugging of Hy code via an interactive pane-based explorer -- allow "stepping" through Hy code, and highlighting portions of HST, AST and Python that relate to the segment. Perhaps also show macros that've touched the code.

I plan to replace hy2py with this. Branch @ paultag/hy/paultag/refactor/debugging

[rwtolbert]

This is interesting.

Do you have a model for this? And do you think there will be the chance to abstract away the GUI bits so there might also be a PySide version possible? Not asking you to write that one, just thinking about the possibilities.

[paultag]

Sure, that sounds totally cool. The major bits of work aren't so much the problem, since it's just invoking code in the importer, we have routines for what I've got in mind.

Something a bit more fancy than:

+------------------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| (print (if true                    | [(u'print' (u'if' u'True'              |
|          (do (+ 1 1) true)         |   (u'do' (u'+' 1 1) u'True')           |
|          (do (+ 2 2) false)))      |   (u'do' (u'+' 2 2) u'False')))]       |
+------------------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| Module(body=[                                                               |
| If(                                                                         |
|   test=Name(id='True', ctx=Load()),                                         |
|   body=[                                                                    |
|       Expr(value=BinOp(left=Num(n=1), op=Add(), right=Num(n=1))),           |
|       Assign(targets=[Name(id='_hy_anon_var_1', ctx=Store())],              |
|              value=Name(id='True', ctx=Load()))],                           |
|   orelse=[Expr(value=BinOp(left=Num(n=2), op=Add(), right=Num(n=2))),       |
|           Assign(targets=[Name(id='_hy_anon_var_1', ctx=Store())],          |
|               value=Name(id='False', ctx=Load()))]),                        |
|           Print(dest=None,                                                  |
|               values=[Name(id='_hy_anon_var_1', ctx=Load())], nl=True)])    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| if True:                                                                    |
|     (1 + 1)                                                                 |
|     _hy_anon_var_1 = True                                                   |
| else:                                                                       |
|     (2 + 2)                                                                 |
|     _hy_anon_var_1 = False                                                  |
| print _hy_anon_var_1                                                        |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

with some sort of highlighting, and being able to trace back where stuff came from (etc)

[paultag]

I'd also like a web-UI based one too, so when running from git, we can enable a feature to drop a Compiler error into a Flask server with a full report of what's going on :)

[Kodiologist]

This is probably outside the scope of Hy itself at this point. Maybe if someone decides to make it, they can add any necessary support code to Hy.