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Comment by ScottFree | Hacker News Reader

WASM is still young. The tooling around it hasn't gained maturity yet. Do you remember trying to debug Javascript before the creation of the in-browser debugger? Desktop application developers back then probably felt the same way you do now.

> this seems like a huge layered mess just waiting to trouble those poor devs.

WASM is a VM. It's less complicated than a javascript engine. How complicated it seems in daily practice is going to come down to how good the tooling is.

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Minor nitpick. WebKit created a debugger a couple of years before chrome existed. https://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing-drosera/

The Mozilla Suite had a javascript debugger (https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/) before either Webkit or Firefox existed. I won't claim it's the first, although it might as well be.

Netscape even had a JS debugger in '97 [0].

[0] http://www.rdwarf.com/lerickson/jscript/jsd.pdf

Wow, I wish I had known that back then. How did I miss that?

Don't worry, you didn't miss much. It was as stable as most software of that era.

Though, surely it wasn't better than the IE js debugger. "Error on line 0"

Yes, the bike shed should definitely be green.

I knew somebody was going to object to that little factoid despite its irrelevance to the point at hand. I've updated my comment to remove any reference to any specific in-browser debugger.

Apologies, didn’t intend to detract from your point. I thought people might be interested in the history of it since very few people even at the time seemed to know of its existence.

No worries. I should have chosen my words more carefully. And, to be fair, I didn't know webkit was the first to create an in-browser debugger either. I always thought it was either Chrome or Firefox.

> Do you remember trying to debug Javascript before the creation of the in-browser debugger?

Yes, I used visual studio. You could debug the server in the same session. It was pretty sweet.

True, without tooling most platforms/languages would suck to work with.

But I believe that the more tooling a stack needs, the more wobbly the stack gets. The more wobble the more error prone and less fun to work with.

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