I was having a chat with [someone who doesn't like to be name checked] last night and he said that the perl debugger is often useless at solving problems. For a compiled language, one can attach gdb or similar to a running process after it's got itself into a state, whereas with perl one either has to run with the debugger from the start (which might take too long, or never exhibit the problem) or not use the debugger.
It would be really useful to be able to attach the perl6 debugger to a running parrot VM, and start debugging, without having the speed hit up to that point of debugging. gdb and similar rely on kernel help to do their attaching to regular running processes. I've no idea how to do such a thing without help to the parrot VM (such that people could chose to have parrot VMs running in production in an attachable state). Can anyone see a sane way to do it? Better still, can anyone see a viable way to do it on perl5? Nicholas Clark
