KIkimi·Oct 24, 2023Submission
FlowStorm: an omniscient time travel debugger for Clojure/CLJS
1 points · Open discussionflow-storm
flow-storm-debugger
Clojure2020–2023
flow-storm / flow-storm-debugger
flow-storm-debugger
A debugger for Clojure and ClojureScript with some unique features.
5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
867GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A debugger for Clojure and ClojureScript with some unique features.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
- djblue/portal · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-11-05 02:19:28 UTC to 2023-10-24 13:59:16 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesTracing debuggers give you the best of both worlds. I've recently started using Flow-storm [0], by @jpmonettas), and it's been quite transformative. You can still easily see the values flowing through your system (better than just "prints"), and it can handle multi-threaded / async scenarios quite nicely. You don't need to manually step through code, you can just "see" your data flow, and when you have loops or some other form of iteration, you can see the data for each pass. Coupling this with a good data visualization tool (such as Portal [1]) really feels like magic. I've been doing Clojure for quite a few years now, and was very happy with my plain REPL-driven workflow, but this is way better.
[0] https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger
[1] https://github.com/djblue/portal
In What I have changed my mind about in software developmentAuthor here. Thanks for the feedback! and yeah I agree adding those features to the landing page is a good idea. I'll add them.
Regarding tools that offer similar capabilities in other languages, I'm not aware, and I have my opinion on why this could be https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger#arent-omni... but I could be wrong.
But there are time travel debuggers for other languages for sure, and some omniscient debuggers too, but with different capabilities.
In FlowStorm: Omniscient time travel debugging for ClojureThis is another example, a tracing time travel debugger for Clojure https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger
Supports a bunch of stuff described there and more.
In What a good debugger can doThere's some good debugging tooling for Clojure as well. A recent entrant is https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger and of course there's the estabilished pretty full featured debugging features in CIDER [1](Emacs), Calva [2] (VS Code) and Cursive (IntelliJ, using std Java JDI debugging). And for barebones tracing from REPL there's goo old clojure.tools.trace. And a bunch of others (sayid, postmortem, cljs-devtools for ClojureScript together with browser debugger, etc)
What CL has over Clojure is mostly the condition system I think.
[1] https://docs.cider.mx/cider/debugging/debugger.html
[2] https://calva.io/debugger/
In Debugging Lisp: trace options, break on conditionsSimilar to SLIME, there is Cider (https://docs.cider.mx/cider/index.html) for Emacs.
There are a lot of debugging and data visualization tools for the repl with features I haven't found in Common Lisp like :
- https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger (which I'm actively working on)
- https://github.com/djblue/portal
In Programming at the REPL: Data VisualizationFlow-storm – Clojure and ClojureScript debugger with some unique features
8 points · Open discussion