Re: Making Lua Debugging Faster

[Mike Pall <mikelu-0802@...>]

steve donovan wrote:
> 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?

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2007-03/msg00016.html

> 2) Would much be gained by making that dedicated hook a C function?

Yes!

> 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?

This could be part of a higher-level debug API for Lua. I've
thrown out some random ideas about it (in the context of LuaJIT,
but relevant for Lua, too):

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-02/msg00111.html
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-02/msg00162.html

--Mike