Hi all,
I'm pleased to report that after a week of work, I could integrate a debugger in Eclipse aCute over the Debug Adapter Protocol, supported by LSP4E.
The debugger is
https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg/ . It seems pretty functional and is OSS under MIT (as opposed to Microsoft's vsdbg which is closed source with strong technical and legal restrictions preventing usage in non-Microsoft products). The maintainer was very reactive to the issues I reported and kindly implemented DAP support and easy packages quite promptly just one request. So while it's not a project shining in the typical ways pseudo-analysts use to evaluate a project health (ie not a lot of commits, not a lot of stars, not a lot of forks), it appeared to me as a very serious project, that is working properly and that is able to react very promptly to non-trivial feature requests.
This debugger has support for the Debug Adapter Protocol. So the first step was to integrate it over the standard DAP Launch Configuration offered by LSP4E to see whether the binding work. And it did work.
Then I created some specific launch configurations (that's what Jonah -autor of DAP support in LSP4E- recommends) to only show user(dotnet developers)-oriented preferences and generate the DAP description from them. This also worked well; but it definitely requires several days of work and some expertise in Eclipse plug-in development. It's relatively cheap for the extremely high value, so the ROI is very high; but it's a still a bit frustrating that it requires Eclipse developers to do it (while the LSP integration is relatively accessible to plain Java developers).
Finally, since the debugger is MIT license, it could be included as fragments inside the delivery so it's available by default (on Linux 64bits and Mac only so far, as netcoredbg doesn't ship yet Windows package).
I think this completely validates the DAP stack and it brings aCute a serious step forward, opening up a can of new ideas and questions like "should we try to take a bit of marketshare of .NET developers?".
Cheers,
