Debugging: past, present and future
summary
Covers concrete tools and results: Xdebug’s HTML and CLI var_dump enhancements, command-line color hooks implemented in about 10 lines of C that save days, and a small 70-line profiler that prints the top 25 costly calls. Demos include vld disassembly and branch/path analysis, phpdbg for PHP 5.6 single‑stepping, and a new trace format 3 that records every state (examples: 3,500‑line traces, frameworks hit ~100,000 lines, users once freed 17 GB of trace files). A time‑travel “step back” tracer exists but is WIP and needs rewrite for PHP 7.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Start
- 0:55Today's agenda
- 10:44Tracing
- 10:56Function traces
- 29:08Activating the Remote Debugger
- 30:09Remote debugging log
- 32:13vld paths #1: code
- 32:51vld paths #1: output
- 35:07vld paths #2: code
- 36:52vld paths #2: output
- 41:57Xdebug code coverage output
- 42:52Xdebug branch coverage output
- 43:19Xdebug branch coverage display
- 46:12Wayback: Wrapper
