With that being said, I'd really love to reattain the level of productivity that I perceive with DevMode when it comes to debugging. SDBG just doesn't even come close to what I consider a real debugger. Stepping and watching variables is just by far not enough by today's IDE standards. I'm not an expert in native browser's JavaScript debugger capabilities. What keeps SDBG from providing the above list of features? If the compiler can map expressions to JavaScript, why can't SDM map those same expressions to something that the native JavaScript debugger can evaluate in-place for the current stack frame? Don't native JavaScript debuggers support conditional breakpoint? It would also come down to injecting the compiled expressions as breakpoint conditions. Don't native JavaScript debuggers support drop-to-frame? If not, can we expect this to change in the future? And what about the dynamic value changes in a native JavaScript debugger?
Javascript debuggers can do most of the things you are asking for. The Chrome debugger can do conditional breakpoints, restart a frame (drop-in-frame), and I think it can also override JS values just fine. It can break on any exception (caught and uncaught) and inside the browser dev tools you can hover certain expressions and see their value.
Some of these features also work in IDEs using SDBG or plain IntelliJ. For example conditional break points just work in IntelliJ, but you have to use JS expressions as you are debugging JS and not Java (how should the IDE dynamically convert a any possible Java expression to a JS expression on the fly as the browser debugger only understands JS ?!). Never tried the drop-to-frame feature but I guess it might also work.
AFAICT to make cross language debugging better, the source maps spec needs to be updated. Currently it seems to lack some information. For example I think it misses variable/parameter names, otherwise chrome debugger would probably show java names instead of JS names in the debugger. On the other hand it is handy that I can see JS variable names as that makes conditional breakpoints possible as I need to use JS expressions ;-)
By the way you would have the same issues with any language compiling to JS, not just GWT. The only exception might be Dart as there is a Dart VM for Chrome. But once you have compiled Dart to JS you are probably in the same situation as with GWT if you need to debug the JS code and use source maps.
-- J.
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