proposal: `node inspect` CLI debugger

[jkrems]

I think this came up during the original V8 inspector discussions.

P.S.: I created a POC port of lib/_debugger.js to the --inspect protocol to make sure this could reasonably be done in core without pulling in additional dependencies.

[jkrems]

I published the "polyfill" to npm as node-inspect (requires node 6):

npm install --global node-inspect

For the implementation status, see this tracking issue. Most things should work already.

[jasnell]

This is definitely interesting but I'm wondering if it would be better to develop this as a standalone client for the time being. Once it's functional, then we can look to see how much sense it makes to bringing it in to core.

[jkrems]

That definitely makes sense. And I'm not looking to submit the code I linked to above to core in the next few days or immediately after this proposal is finalized/merged.

But my impression was that the current command line debugger is already depending on (more or less) unsupported parts of V8. So it seemed like a good idea to have an official plan for "the day it breaks". The proposal explicitly doesn't mention my repo. It just suggests a potential interface for transitioning the official built-in debugger from the old V8 protocol to the new inspector protocol.

[jasnell]

btw, relevant to this: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/7266

[jkrems]

Thanks for the link! Must've been blind. :)

[jkrems]

After playing around with the finished debugger - it feels like a wasted opportunity to go down this route.