Real function names come to WebKit debugger

April 29, 2009 • 1 min read


Francisco Tolmasky of 280 North was, like most JavaScript developers, frustrated with some aspects of debugging. Unlike most JavaScript developers, he’s started patching WebKit to improve the experience:

Anyone who’s done a significant amount of profiling with Firebug has probably run into the dreaded question mark functions at some point or another. … So in order to solve this issue once and for all, we decided to define a way to explicitly give functions a name for debugging: the displayName attribute. … The other thing we focused heavily on doing these last couple of weeks was completely rewriting the Bottom Up View of the WebKit profiler.

This should be a big win for people writing thick-client web apps with Cappuccino, GWT, SproutCore, and the like. It seems 280 North guys aren’t going to stop challenging what people think are Javascript’s limits.


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