It's harder for your debug environment to take apart and show the details of every object down to the OS/hardware level if you've got security to prevent it, an

It's harder for your debug environment to take apart and show the details of every object down to the OS/hardware level if you've got security to prevent it, and harder yet if it doesn't have a very good idea of the specifics of the binary representation. We'd see this problem a lot with calling conventions (C-style vs Pascal-style vs pretty much any weird thing you found a reason to do) if our gdb-based debuggers tried harder to figure out what was going on. Luckily, they rarely really bother and are wrong constant anyway about things like optimization -- they're built to do fairly little and live in constant confusion, so we don't get that problem. And for the record, I like gdb and company. But every so often I get a wet dream about being able to have a debugger that could show me useful representations of objects and what they do. Things are better in Ruby-land, but still not actually, like, good.