Debug.js: A JavaScript VM and In-Browser Debugger In Pure JS Generators

New submitter amasad writes "This post describes building a JavaScript virtual machine and an in-browser stepping debugger using the latest JavaScript generator feature. It's called debug.js. 'For the past few years I’ve been working on creating tools to help people learn programming on the web. I’ve worked on repl.it and open sourced the underlying technology which powered a few learn to code websites and until recently lead product engineering at Codecademy. Through all that, one thing I really wanted to see are the tools to make it possible to visualize code execution and step through code in the browser. To catch glimpse of what an ideal interactive learning environment would be you should check out Learnable Programming by Bret Victor. In addition to the educational benefits of such a tool, if matured it could be also useful for code instrumentation, web IDEs, and creating a foundation for writing other VMs on top of JavaScript (having the pausable machine state let's you not worry about the non-blocking environment). Ever since I've read about the ES6 Generators proposal, I’ve been toying with this idea in my head but it wasn't a real possibility until Ben Newman's Regenerator brought generators to the browser.'"

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