[HN Gopher] Show HN: Recompyle - A JavaScript developer-friendly...
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Show HN: Recompyle - A JavaScript developer-friendly console /
debugger
Hi HN, I'm Damien, the solo founder of Recompyle. Self-funded. As
a JavaScript developer, I have been annoyed by the console.log not
being practical enough, and the debugger being 'too slow'. So I
made Recompyle to fix that. It's kind of a mix of the console and
the debugger. Plus, some file parsing to automatically log the
start of the functions of the files you are working on.
Author : dam11
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-12-07 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.recompyle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.recompyle.com)
| albertzeyer wrote:
| The name sounds like a Python project.
| Retr0id wrote:
| This was my initial reaction too, especially since "Decompyle"
| was a popular python bytecode decompiler ("was" because it
| seems to have been superseded by pycdc at this point)
| orng wrote:
| I think you are sort of abusing the github logo above the "Closed
| Source - for a sustainable business model" text. Most people
| associate it with open source, it doesn't even make any sense
| there!
| foxbarrington wrote:
| Agreed. Would make more sense with a red X over it.
| zxt_tzx wrote:
| Haha it's almost like the Stroop effect, where you print the
| word "red" in blue ink instead of red ink.
|
| I think you're solving a real pain point but to be honest I
| watched the video a few times and have trouble understanding
| how it works/differs from a regular debugger.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The trailer video needs narration and maybe some music, or at
| least music with some text describing what you're showing.
| jraph wrote:
| > Closed Source
|
| > For a sustainable business.
|
| Especially when also associated with "Developer Friendly", seeing
| "closed source" with "sustainable" hurts so bad. I hope it does
| not persuade too many people. People should know that with open
| source software, they can rely on it not to disappear overnight
| if a company behind it vanishes. _This_ is sustainable.
|
| I work for an open source company without VC money that has been
| running for 20 years soon. They are ways to do open source and
| sustainable at the same time.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > People should know that with open source software, they can
| rely on it not to disappear overnight if a company behind it
| vanishes.
|
| I've seen so many OSS projects abandoned because the
| maintainers couldn't find the time, given they had to work
| full-time on something else that would allow them to pay the
| bills.
| keb_ wrote:
| I've seen the same, but with closed-source projects, and then
| there is zero hope of it ever being revived because no one
| can fork it. :(
|
| At least with OSS, you have the power to patch it and
| recompile yourself.
| jraph wrote:
| Of course. You still need to make your project sustainable in
| some way.
|
| You can sell support. You can sell consulting. You can do it
| the curl way and make yourself hired for developing your
| useful thing full time.
|
| Not saying it's easy. Building a product and selling it in a
| way or another is not easy.
|
| As a sibling comment say, at least the source is here, if
| you've come to rely on this unmaintained piece of code at
| least something is possible.
|
| But I was mostly reacting to the association of "Closed
| Source" and "For sustainable business", like if sustainable
| business was not possible with open source. It is. Many
| companies succeed in this.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Doesn't work for tons of domains, e.g. native desktop
| software, games, good developer tooling like Enterprise
| Architect or OutSystems.
| jraph wrote:
| > native desktop software
|
| But it can. I mentioned Igalia and MediaInfo, and
| developed on this at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38556450#38557836
|
| I don't really know about games and good developer
| tooling, so I can't speak for these domains. Games are
| probably particularly tough. But I really think people
| may pay you for implementing features they need, buy
| support and for doing custom dev work. That last one
| takes your time out of your main product though, but if
| you manage to do custom work on top of your main product,
| it can still be a good deal.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Regular people, that already do pirate software a lot,
| see open source as free beer, and won't pay for any kind
| of support, rather have family members as usual.
|
| With commercial desktop software at least there is the
| shadow of the law, thus some companies do survive despite
| piracy.
|
| Hence why digital stores are so beloved by companies
| selling desktop like applications.
|
| I bet there is hardly any company sustaining their
| business from sales on F-Droid.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm torn on this. My absolute favorite piece of developer
| tooling is the JetBrains IDEs, which far outstrip all fully
| open source alternatives. They're partially open source, but
| the reason why JetBrains can make such great tools _is_ because
| their model allows them to pay developers to work on their
| tools full time.
|
| I love open source, but OP isn't wrong to decide to prioritize
| building a sustainable business over releasing their code.
|
| Whether you personally prefer the guarantees that FOSS provides
| or the benefits that having salaried employees working on the
| project full time provides is a personal decision.
| jraph wrote:
| But I'm paid full time by my open source company, like my 60
| colleagues, and the stuff we build is fully open source,
| except for custom, consulting projects based on this open
| source software we build.
|
| Open core is at least something (and I'm forced to agree with
| you, IntelliJ mostly kills everything, I capitulated and
| ended up adopting the community version recently against
| other IDEs, initially for its Java debugger) but you can pay
| devs full time with completely open source stuff.
|
| Companies are more than willing to pay for support,
| consulting or even paid pre-built binaries that come with a
| bit of support, when it's more convenient.
|
| Again, not saying it's easy, and each project is different,
| but that's something possible.
| lolinder wrote:
| What company are you working for? What is the business
| model?
|
| Most successful open source companies I can think of are
| server-side applications or Linux distros, where the
| company sells support or hosting. I'm not sure how that
| would work for a desktop app.
| jraph wrote:
| > where the company sells support or hosting
|
| Yep, you got this. We also sell open source extensions
| (yep, you could build and download the code, and strip
| the license handling, but somehow companies will pay for
| the convenience of having the install and upgrade done
| automatically - they also know that they support the
| company behind the thing they use, in a way that can be
| easily justified to their accounting department, with an
| invoice, and get some support hours included, which they
| like. Paying for something that is paid is easier than
| donating!). And we also do (a lot of) consulting.
|
| For desktop applications, it might be harder indeed.
| Though JetBrains does have an extension store and could
| do the same, and also sell support.
|
| Not sure about the consulting, but why not? Maybe they
| could sell some of the expertise they have on actually a
| big number of topics. I'm sure companies would be eager
| to pay them to implement feature in their IDEs they need,
| or to build components specific to their setup /
| projects. I'm discovering that companies will spend money
| on all sorts of things, I'm actually somewhat surprised
| by this.
|
| Igalia [3], for instance, does this with browsers. They
| sell consulting around browsers and also get paid to
| contribute features in the big engines.
|
| I mentioned curl earlier, Daniel gets paid for doing
| commercial support on curl [1]:
|
| > I work for wolfSSL from home doing commercial curl
| support. If you need help to fix curl problems, fix your
| app's use of libcurl, add features to curl, fix curl
| bugs, optimize your curl use or libcurl education for
| your developers... Then I'm your man. Contact us!
|
| There's also MediaInfo [2], an open source tool to get
| all sorts of information on videos. They get paid to
| implement features and to do consulting.
|
| I'm sure you can sell support / consulting for all sorts
| of things.
|
| > What company are you working for?
|
| XWiki.
|
| [1] https://daniel.haxx.se/
|
| [2] https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo
|
| [3] https://www.igalia.com/
| no_wizard wrote:
| there are different classes of this.
|
| I think the fact there are already an abundant amount of _free_
| and _good_ tools for debugging JavaScript - many of which you
| don 't even need extensions to use, its simply knowing how to
| get around the builtin debugger and inspector - make _this
| class of product_ harder to make money off of.
|
| Something like say a database is much harder to replicate and
| has a very high barrier to entry by comparison and have more
| verticals for actually acquiring and charging customers of the
| software
|
| Neither of these are judgements for or against a thing, simply
| wanted to highlight the realities.
|
| What I will say is this makes the barrier of entry for
| something like this _very high_ before someone is willing to
| open their wallet.
| majestic5762 wrote:
| You just pretty print console logs at breakpoint location. IDE
| extension + some web app. Why closed source lol. I won't pay for
| it, could build my own. Sorry but you first need open source
| traction and then try to sell to enterprises. Good luck
| replwoacause wrote:
| Not every project needs to be open source. It's his work and
| his business, if he wants it closed source that's perfectly
| fine.
| chii wrote:
| Since it's a paid product, i would like to shill for an open
| source product that performs a similar function:
| https://github.com/djblue/portal
|
| Unfortunately, it is only usable for a clojure(script) code base,
| as it requires a REPL. For a live demo of what it does:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-iyDo3bq0 , or just explore the
| UI and see for yourself https://djblue.github.io/portal/
| the_linux_lich wrote:
| The audacity, charging for a service which you know doesn't work
| everywhere lol
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Not all that different from paying for a "Only works on Mac"
| app, but it does seem odd to charge this much for something
| that isn't done yet. This is open/closed beta territory, not
| "charging money before it's even ready" territory.
| keb_ wrote:
| It's an interesting idea, but a few points:
|
| * Your documentation states "Recompyle will not work for every
| project right now. It's a work in progress." Maybe an open/closed
| beta phase is appropriate right now instead of charging $33 for
| something that may not even work?
|
| * I may be missing some functionality, but $33/year/user seems
| steep for something that I think I can emulate by just setting
| breakpoints normally and manually resuming process execution in
| Chrome Debugger.
|
| * Your site seems to imply that Open Source projects cannot be
| sustainable businesses, but we see this all the time (Supabase,
| Aseprite, Miniflux). I would remove that from your site anyway
| because it's not exactly a selling point.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Your site seems to imply that Open Source projects cannot be
| sustainable businesses, but we see this all the time (Supabase,
| Aseprite, Miniflux). I would remove that from your site anyway
| because it's not exactly a selling point.
|
| Notably, 2/3 of your examples are server-side applications
| where the product is hosting, and Aseprite isn't open source,
| it's source-available.
|
| In general, businesses around open source tend to either be
| selling hosting or support. For a client-side application,
| hosting isn't an option, and I also doubt that selling support
| packages will work for something small like developer tooling--
| the examples I can think of of client-side sustainable FOSS
| businesses are all Linux distros.
|
| Do you have any other examples of client-side FOSS businesses
| that I'm missing?
|
| Edit: one strategy I missed is open core, like JetBrains, but
| since that's a hybrid model I think that's actually evidence in
| favor of OP's claim that FOSS is hard to sustain.
| jraph wrote:
| > Do you have any other examples of client-side FOSS
| businesses that I'm missing?
|
| Just thought about Linphone. (in addition to those I
| mentioned in my other comments)
|
| https://linphone.org/
| keb_ wrote:
| My point was to counter this idea that open-source ===
| unprofitable, but another example is Mindustry
| https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry.
| lolinder wrote:
| Oh, that's an interesting one! Available on Steam but also
| open source.
| lolinder wrote:
| You're getting a lot of hot takes, which is too bad!
|
| For my part, I've been trying to come up with something
| constructive to say but I'm having a rather hard time
| understanding what this project is, so I guess that's my
| feedback. The landing page tells me almost nothing about why I'd
| pay for a third-party debugger, and the docs on GitHub are only a
| little bit better and not super persuasive.
|
| Maybe I'm just not the target audience, but I think you need to
| really capture the pain points you're solving before showing me
| screenshots and videos of how you've solved them. As it is all
| I'm seeing is a developer tools window with a slightly different
| layout than Firefox/Chrome.
| sesm wrote:
| Looks like an alternative client for chrome://inspect and works
| on top of the same protocol (you need to launch with '--
| inspect' flag).
| vmfunction wrote:
| Or the debug in vscode, then again in vscode you can edit the
| code also. Maybe this console has VM binding. Just feel like
| it should just be a vscode plugin.
| solardev wrote:
| > Maybe I'm just not the target audience, but I think you need
| to really capture the pain points you're solving before showing
| me screenshots and videos of how you've solved them. As it is
| all I'm seeing is a developer tools window with a slightly
| different layout than Firefox/Chrome.
|
| Same here. I watched the video and couldn't quite figure out
| what it's trying to show. It just looks like it's logging
| requests similar to the inspector or the debugger. That's cool,
| but how is it different or better?
| progx wrote:
| In dev-mode is use a separate monitor that logs human friendly
| output. That output is generated by frontend and backend and
| transfered via socket (errors too). I run automatically on save
| only that part of the app, that i am working on, normally with a
| test.
|
| Only in a few special cases i need to debug and traverse errors
| step by step.
|
| I can not understand why people use complicated bloated tools, in
| which you must click so many times until you get all needed data.
| Good log output is for me the best solution.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I see in the product demo he's debugging from WebStorm with
| Chrome. The problem I very much need solved here is that if I set
| a breakpoint, and _stop execution_ Chrome has to be closed and
| completely relaunched to hit a break point again. Hitting Stop
| somehow disconnects Chrome and Storm in a way that refresh does
| not fix or reconnect. It 's extremely annoying and tedious.
| no_wizard wrote:
| They used to have a web extension for Firefox and Chrome that
| let you re-connect by clicking on it. I know they deprecated
| that in favor of what they do now (which I think is partially
| facitilated by changes in how extensions are handled by both
| those respective browsers) but I do hit this issue more than
| I'd like as well
| agosta wrote:
| "It's possible" and "it's easy" to make money in open source are
| two wildly different things. Pretty sure the creator of this
| knows it's possible to make money in open source but that
| charging $33 per year is also probably not going to cover all
| their expenses. They've done a ton of work (they made 2 IDE
| extensions!) and have likely been paid very little for it so far.
| If it's not for you then don't buy it but don't try to tell
| someone they can't charge peanuts selling something they've spent
| a ton of time making. 33 a year is practically nothing. Sometimes
| I swear this whole industry has been spoiled by the gifts of free
| labor
| rafaelgoncalves wrote:
| I think the problem here is not the price but charging for what
| seems a personal project or a product that isn't even finished.
| Why someone have to pay to test if this works? Don't get any
| traction...
| agosta wrote:
| Loads of people buy the beta versions of games. Others wait
| for the thing to be finished. It's an MVP and whether people
| buy is some of the most valuable feedback this dev is going
| to get.
|
| I understand complaining about price if it's truly
| outrageous, but demanding it be Open Source (which is most
| often just dog whistling for it to be free) is peak
| entitlement.
| rafaelgoncalves wrote:
| I can see your points and think they are legit. Only think
| there are more alternatives to get real feedback than
| selling, why not choose a closed beta like others comments
| said? This could be much more productive.
| agosta wrote:
| I agree with that. I'm not sure on the specifics of this
| rollout but I think it's all still pretty risk free -
| it's got a 7 day free trial. If it's not up to par, one
| can cancel.
| cxr wrote:
| Your screencast commits the sin of trying to fly through a
| demonstration from a script that you have access to but no one
| watching does. It's not clear what you're doing or what the
| significance of any given thing on screen is (and what things
| shown on the screen are insignificant). I'm at 0:24 of 1:32, I've
| skipped back 4 times to see what's going on and what you're
| trying to communicate. If you don't want to record audio to
| narrate what you're doing, that's fine, but go have a look at the
| Primitive Technology channel and take note of how he uses
| captions for a non-existent audio track. Copy that, if nothing
| else; the video as-is is ineffective--not quite useless but very
| close.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Not a JS dev...but looks like he is just triggering breakpoints
| in the video? But yeah, it's mostly useless. Maybe the tool is
| good though, can't really tell.
| Sytten wrote:
| If there is a price, people will pay. Donation based oss just
| doesn't work except in a very few exceptions and specially not
| for software self-hosted. I support your statement on non-open
| source for sustainability. This is the same stance we took when
| we started Caido.
|
| You could use some better marketing though, I am a web Dev and I
| didnt understand the value proposition.
| mt_ wrote:
| Closed source. Easy skip sir.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Nah. Not everyone is an OSS zealot. If a tool works for me I
| don't give a shit if it is open or closed source.
| themikesanto wrote:
| I don't think I would ever use this project, and I especially
| would not pay for it.
|
| From scanning the website and documentation, it seems like a less
| useful debugger than currently available open source tools. I
| really have no idea what this project is trying to achieve.
|
| and then there's this:
|
| > Yes you need an account to use recompyle.
|
| > The account is used to validate the license. Nothing more.
|
| > The only thing send to our server is a hash of your "machineId"
|
| > The App run on you computer, your code is private and not send
| to our servers.
|
| > No analytics or error tracking.
|
| You expect me to simply trust your word that this debugger won't
| do anything nefarious? Not a chance.
| mcluck wrote:
| I write web code all day every day which makes me think I'm the
| target audience. I have no idea what this does beyond the built
| in dev tools. From what I gleamed from the video, it looks like
| it might make it easier to setup watch variables?
| rglover wrote:
| This is rad, Damien. Great work.
|
| Can you send an email to ryan.glover@cheatcode.co (didn't see
| anything listed on the site)? Want to discuss how I could make
| this work with Joystick [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick
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