Question

I am able to debug my ruby program. At times, I would want to go inside the library methods and see what is happening. How to achieve it in Ruby.

For example,

[ 3, 1, 7, 0 ].sort

i would want to go inside the sort method and see how that works lively. In Java+Eclipse this is possible, all I have to do is to attach the source of Foundation classes in Eclipse. Is it possible in Ruby with Netbeans as IDE?

Thanks

Answer 1

For those methods which are implemented in Ruby, the debugger will just step into them.

For those methods which are not implemented in Ruby, i.e. they are implemented in C in MRI, YARV and tinyrb, in Java in JRuby and XRuby, in C# in IronRuby and Ruby.NET, in Smalltalk in MagLev and SmallRuby, in ABAP in BlueRuby, in Go in RubyGoLightly, in C++ in Rubinius or in Objective-C in MacRuby, the NetBeans Ruby plugin contains a stub method that only lists the method signature and the RDoc comments, but not the actual implementation.

The NetBeans Ruby debugger is, after all, a Ruby debugger, it doesn’t know how to step into C, C++, Objective-C, C#, Smalltalk, ABAP or Java.

It would probably be possible to somehow link together the Ruby debugger with, say, the C++ debugger (provided that you have installed the NetBeans C++ plugin), but nobody has done that work yet.

In your specific case, in almost all Ruby implementations, Array#sort is not implemented in Ruby. The only exception is probably Rubinius, but I don’t know whether Rubinius is supported by the NetBeans Ruby plugin (I use Windows and Rubinius isn’t supported on Windows).