Debugging

There are multiple ways to debug what Boa is doing. Or maybe you just want to know how it works under the hood. Or even test some JavaScript.

One way to do so is to create a file in the root of the repository. For example test.js. Then execute cargo run -- test.js to run the file with boa.

You can also run boa interactively by simply calling cargo run without any arguments to start a shell to execute JS.

These are added in order of how the code is read:

Tokens

The first thing boa will do is generate tokens from source code. If the token generation is wrong the rest of the operation will be wrong, this is usually a good starting place.

To print the tokens to stdout, you can use the boa_cli command-line flag --dump-tokens, which can optionally take a format type. Supports these formats: Debug, Json, JsonPretty. By default it is the Debug format.

cargo run -- test.js --dump-tokens # token dump format is Debug by default.

or with interactive mode (REPL):

cargo run -- --dump-tokens # token dump format is Debug by default.

Or you can do it manually by navigating to parser_expr in lib.rs and add dbg!(&tokens); just below tokens to see the array of token output. You code should look like this:

    let mut lexer = Lexer::new(src);
    lexer.lex().expect("lexing failed");
    let tokens = lexer.tokens;
    dbg!(&tokens);
    ...

Seeing the order of tokens can be a big help to understanding what the parser is working with.

Note: flags --dump-tokens and --dump-ast are mutually exclusive. When using the flag --dump-tokens, the code will not be executed.

Expressions

Assuming the tokens looks fine, the next step is to see the AST. You can use the boa_cli command-line flag --dump-ast, which can optionally take a format type. Supports these formats: Debug, Json, JsonPretty. By default it is the Debug format.

Dumping the AST of a file:

cargo run -- test.js --dump-ast # AST dump format is Debug by default.

or with interactive mode (REPL):

cargo run -- --dump-ast # AST dump format is Debug by default.

Or manually, you can output the expressions in forward, add dbg!(&expr);

These methods will print out the entire parse tree.

Note: flags --dump-tokens and --dump-ast are mutually exclusive. When using the flag --dump-ast, the code will not be executed.

Execution

Once the tree has been generated exec will begin to run through each expression. If the tokens and tree looks fine, you can start looking here. I usually just add dbg!() in the relevent places to see what the output is at the time.

Debugger

VS Code Debugger

The quickest way to get debugging is to re-open the workspace in the container (using the Dockerfile provided). This is using the Remote Containers plugin. Once inside make sure you have the CodeLLDB extension installed and add breakpoints.

LLDB Manually

You can also use rust-lldb. The Dockerfile already has this enabled, you should be able to use that environment to run your code. rust-lldb ./target/debug/boa [arguments]

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