Making Lua Debugging Faster

["steve donovan" <steve.j.donovan@...>]

Hi guys,

I've been working on the next edition of scite-debug, and finding out
that debugging can be really slow with non-trivial programs. Which is
of course what the manual says, anyway, and any technique that depends
on processing all the hook calls in Lua is going to put a lot of
overhead into the process. So here are some questions:

1) Mostly, we are wanting to get to the next breakpoint. Would it be
significantly faster to be only catching 'call' events and doing some
clever breakpoint detection logic, instead of checking every 'line'
event?
2) Would much be gained by making that dedicated hook a C function?
3) Was any thought given to implementing 'hard' breakpoints, e.g. like
x86 'int 0x3'. The idea is that there is a special opcode which is
inserted by debuggers, which replaces the old opcode and triggers a
special debug event?

steve d.