Product Launch
anonymous
68 points
15 comments
Posted23 days agoActive22 days ago
Wirebrowser
github.combetadeveloper_tooldevelopers
Key Features
Breakpoint-Driven Heap SearchLive Object Searchrequest rewritingheap snapshots
Tech Stack
Key Features
Tech Stack
I sometimes find these tools crash hard when pushed via large memory items, huge blobs of code, long base64 strings etc. Even chrome dev tools crash hard on large WS Messages.
Also perhaps post the video near the top instead of hiding it in the origin paper :), kids like videos these days.
Good point about the video ;) I’ll surface it more prominently, the whitepaper ended up a bit dense, so having the visual demo earlier probably helps a lot.
Wirebrowser started as an experiment to unify those workflows and make it possible to follow those values directly instead of stitching together multiple tools. It grew from the pain points I kept running into.
Why not just do proper time travel? Is that absent for Javascript?
Wirebrowser sits at the other end of the spectrum: it attaches to any unmodified browser that supports CDP and works directly with the live runtime. The workflows end up being very different, but it’s fascinating to see what becomes possible when the runtime itself participates in the recording.
The browser’s debugging API (CDP) also doesn’t provide a way to capture or rewind engine state without modifying the application.
BDHS works within the constraints of zero instrumentation: it relies only on Debugger.paused and heap snapshots, so it can trace where a value originates without altering the code being debugged.
I am working on doing something similar in C++, where there is an additional obstacle of recreating the objects from a memory snapshot without runtime support.
Doing similar work in C++ is on a totally different level: raw memory, no type info, pointer chasing, layout inference... Very curious to hear how you’re approaching it.
Wirebrowser comes at it from a different angle - no instrumentation, just inspecting the live heap and following how values propagate. Curious to see what people end up exploring with these approaches.
Nice work!
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