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I love writing Python. However, there are caveats: 1: I don't like dealing with language crossing boundaries with it - it's painful, especially if to/from a co

I love writing Python. However, there are caveats: 1: I don't like dealing with language crossing boundaries with it - it's painful, especially if to/from a compiled language - there's just too much friction. It's easy to write but hard to maintain. 2: Debugging python can be...painful. If you have a pure perfect environment dedicated to pure python and all the tooling set up, it can be breezy. But if you have something messier like C++ that calls Python or vice-versa and are using an editor not made for Python like QTCreator then suddenly it becomes hell. Who owns this data!? Where was this initialized!? What calls this function!? What type is this data!?!?!?!? These questions are so effortless in C++ for me and so very painful in Python. It slows efforts to a crawl. It feels exhausting to have to go back to print statements, grep, and hand-drawing a graph that shows what functions call what just to figure out WTF went wrong. It's painful to a degree that I avoid it as much as possible. ...and don't even get me started on dealing with dependency problems in deployments...

gh02t 1y ago
I've long lusted after a smooth debugging workflow writing Cython that would let you seamlessly debug between Python and C/C++. I think there are some hacks to do it, but nothing really well integrated.
miguel_martin 1y ago
Python debugging is great when you're strictly debugging Python code. Placing a `breakpoint` or spinning up an IPython instance to investigate the issue via `import IPython; IPython.embed()` makes life breezy. For neovim, you can send code to the ipython REPL easily via vim-slime. I've never found myself debugging the underlying C++ code unless developing a C++ extension. But is it really that hard? Just point lldb to the python process and run your script in lldb. If the C++ is not yours & assuming it's a mature lib (e.g. PyTorch): it's probably an error caused by you in Python land.
- Night_Thastus 1y ago
  Both the C++ and Python are mine. I have cases of both C++ calling Python, and Python calling C++. Problems could be on either side. The problem is how to step into one from the other, you really can't as far as I know. The python parts aren't standalone enough that it could just be run on its own, there's so much setup involved prior to that point that it can really only be run from the top-level user controls.

gh02t 1y ago

I've long lusted after a smooth debugging workflow writing Cython that would let you seamlessly debug between Python and C/C++. I think there are some hacks to do it, but nothing really well integrated.

miguel_martin 1y ago

Python debugging is great when you're strictly debugging Python code. Placing a `breakpoint` or spinning up an IPython instance to investigate the issue via `import IPython; IPython.embed()` makes life breezy. For neovim, you can send code to the ipython REPL easily via vim-slime. I've never found myself debugging the underlying C++ code unless developing a C++ extension. But is it really that hard? Just point lldb to the python process and run your script in lldb. If the C++ is not yours & assuming it's a mature lib (e.g. PyTorch): it's probably an error caused by you in Python land.

Night_Thastus 1y ago
Both the C++ and Python are mine. I have cases of both C++ calling Python, and Python calling C++. Problems could be on either side. The problem is how to step into one from the other, you really can't as far as I know. The python parts aren't standalone enough that it could just be run on its own, there's so much setup involved prior to that point that it can really only be run from the top-level user controls.