WEBSTORM DEBUG CONSOLE RETURNS OBJECT FULL
WEBSTORM DEBUG CONSOLE RETURNS OBJECT CODE

(Also, all these copies would not be garbage-collected until you cleared the console.)Īn universal deep copy is impractical to implement (notice how nobody seems to ever implement it, at all, in any programming language), and having console.log() do one would be an incredibly powerful and unpredictable footgun. An unlucky console.log() could easily copy half of your heap into the console, and god help you if you logged a DOM element. if two random objects A and B both have a pointer to the same object C, the copied A' and B' better both point at the same C').

WEBSTORM DEBUG CONSOLE RETURNS OBJECT FULL

To log a static snapshot with equivalent interactive expansion capability, console.log() would have to do a general deep copy of your object - it would have to walk every pointer in the object and replace the pointee with its own recursive full deep copy, making sure to detect and handle cycles well, and keeping track of every replacement to ensure referential integrity (e.g. This is fast to do, and most of the time, it's exactly what you want. When you console.log() an object, it just stores a pointer to the object, and decorates it with an interactive label containing some text, so that it looks nice.

The only thing that breaks the model is the transpilation and minification, without sourcemaps.įWIW, it's not like it could work in any other way.

Print debugging is invaluable, but I can't help but think there's something of Smalltalk or Lisp in how you can mess with your app within a sandbox through the inspector, at runtime.

WEBSTORM DEBUG CONSOLE RETURNS OBJECT CODE

You can get quite close to that after you've bundled your code and deployed it to a server, so long as you've got good source maps going on. I can't remember the last time I've used a console.log over setting a breakpoint in the debugger and fucking with the application state at that point to understand an issue. The console will reflect on the entire scope and annotate the code with their runtime values, the same as you get when working inside a JetBrains IDE.īut it's JS, so you can tweak it without committing it to disk and so you get some form of REPL driven development. You can hit Ctrl+Shift+P in the inspector and use the same kind of fuzzy file matcher you have in Sublime Text or VS Code, and from there you can set breakpoints, modify the code in memory, and so on. In a local build you basically have a 1:1 mapping of source code to deployed code and the debugger here basically becomes your IDE.

The best trick for actual debugging is to leverage your browser console.

Webstorm debug console returns object