Sourcemaps: the holy grale for Amber?

Hi guys,

With Manfred we talked about improving the debugger of Amber. The
obvious solution seems to be source maps:

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/sourcemaps/

It is currently supported by both Firefox and Chrome

The plan would be (in a first step) to:

- remove all context creation from Amber
- Generate maps for the .js files
- Maybe write the source code of each Smalltalk method in a dedicated
  file instead of using the chunk format
- then we could remove the sources from the .js files, and remove
  .deploy.js files too

The advantages:

- we get the speed of JavaScript as we would compile to straight JS
  (yeah!!)
- We could use the debugger of Chrome and Firefox, and thus get a 100%
  working debugger!
- It would be a lot simpler than writing and AST interpreter

Downsides:

- We rely on source mapping, and lose control over the debugger features
- For consistency purposes, the IDE of Amber could be an extension to
  the Chrome dev tools, as an additional tab.

What do you think?

Personnaly, I think this is very exciting. It could very well be the
best thing to happen to Amber since... Amber ;)

Cheers,
Nico

I think adding the IDE to the chrome tab would be fantastic. It would
make development much easier.

How hard do you think it would be?

On 11 Dec 2012, at 08:41, Nicolas Petton <[hidden email]> wrote:

Andy Burnett <[hidden email]> writes:

> I think adding the IDE to the chrome tab would be fantastic. It would
> make development much easier.
>
> How hard do you think it would be?

Not much. Helios (the next IDE) is made to run remotely anyway :)

Cheers,
Nico


--
Nicolas Petton
http://nicolas-petton.fr

That's a fantastic proposal.

I used source maps only with minified JavaScript and with some toylike tests with CoffeeScript.

I look forward to see it in action in Amber.

Will it be possible to "restart/drop" the execution from a particular stack frame? You can't do that in JS (at least I don't know how).

Regards!

Nicolas Petton wrote:
Looks good. Hopefully there isn't some hidden trap there.

> The advantages:
>
> - we get the speed of JavaScript as we would compile to straight JS
>    (yeah!!)
We sort-of do now. I don't get this.

> - We could use the debugger of Chrome and Firefox, and thus get a 100%
>    working debugger!
> - It would be a lot simpler than writing and AST interpreter
This either.

> Downsides:
>
> - We rely on source mapping, and lose control over the debugger features
Hm :-/
Maybe not, look below.
> - For consistency purposes, the IDE of Amber could be an extension to
>    the Chrome dev tools, as an additional tab.
In that case, the Smalltalk-savvy debugger (extensions) could be part of it.

> What do you think?
The bad thing is reliance on only a few browsers. But it is only for
development, the prodyuction code should work. But bye-bye amber web,
where you browse, click Class Browser and get in. Installing a browser
extension (not to mention different browser) is a barrier to adoption (I
remember myself how a "get a facebook app in 2 minutes" got me into
AppJet if someone remembers it yet :-) ).

> Personnaly, I think this is very exciting. It could very well be the
> best thing to happen to Amber since... Amber ;)
>
> Cheers,
> Nico

Herby

Herby Vojčík <[hidden email]> writes:
>> The advantages:
>>
>> - we get the speed of JavaScript as we would compile to straight JS
>>    (yeah!!)
> We sort-of do now. I don't get this.

the message_send branch is a step forward, yes. But the idea was to
remove SmalltalkContext completely. Then we would get the speed of JS.

> The bad thing is reliance on only a few browsers. But it is only for
> development, the prodyuction code should work. But bye-bye amber web,
> where you browse, click Class Browser and get in. Installing a browser
> extension (not to mention different browser) is a barrier to adoption (I
> remember myself how a "get a facebook app in 2 minutes" got me into
> AppJet if someone remembers it yet :-) ).

Well, not necessarily. We could use the debugger API of Chrome/Firefox
to write our own debugger on top of it. Now this means that debugging
would still be available for Firefox and Chrome, but the IDE would be
available everywhere.

I don't know yet how it should be done, but sourcemaps definitely looks
like the way to go.

Nico

Hello

Hi Gerald,

Well, if we go this path, thisContext will for sure go away. We are
still thinking about it though, not sure yet which path we'll take :)

Nico

Denis Kudriashov <[hidden email]> writes:

--
Nicolas Petton
http://nicolas-petton.fr

It would be nice if the development of amber was more transparent to the users.

Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[hidden email]> writes:

> It would be nice if the development of amber was more transparent to the
> users.
> (for example, there is no information for helios anywhere)
> Maybe have the amber-lang site point to a blog that talks about the future
> of amber.
> Or use this list to inform users of changes that will happen in the
> future.

Indeed. I'll write an email with the current development of Amber. A
blog would be nice, but as always, writing blog posts takes time :/

>
> Most importantly, i would like to be informed of changes that could stop my
> code from working.

Sure. Until now we've kept Amber backward compatible, and when it was
not the case, there has always been infos on how to upgrade.

Nico

--
Nicolas Petton
http://nicolas-petton.fr