Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old
Hey HN my name is Thassilo, I'm a student and passionate programmer from Germany. I want to showcase Spray, a small C debugger I've been working on for a few months now. Spray has a very simple and approachable interface. Its feature set is limited at this point, but it's already enough to tackle some basic problems. I stared to work on Spray because I was curious about how debuggers work. I am also trying to design Spray in such a way that it's easy to grasp and has a small mental overhead. I'd love to get your feedback on Spray. Email: d4kd (at) proton (dot) me PS: I'm generally interested…
Spray is a C debugger with a simple, approachable interface designed for basic debugging tasks. Built by a German student over several months, it prioritizes ease of use and minimal cognitive overhead for developers… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1AW
Hey HN, I wanted to show you a product a small team and I have been working on for 4 years. https://jam.dev It’s called Jam and it prevents product managers (like I used to be) from being able to create vague and un-reproducible bug tickets (like I used to create). It’s actually really hard as a non-engineer to file useful bug tickets for engineers. Like, sometimes I thought I included a screenshot, but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary of the screenshot I took. Or I'd write that something "didn't work" but the engineer…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 2
Hi HN! We’re Adrien and Kanav. We met at our previous job, where we spent about a third of our lives combating a constant firehose of bugs. In the hope of reducing this pain for others in the future, we’re working on automating debugging. We’re currently working on a platform that ingests logs and then automatically reproduces, root causes and ultimately fixes production bugs as they happen. You can see some of our work on this here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39528087 As we were building the root-cause phase of our automated debugger, we realized that we developed…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
debugcode.ai▲103Debug like never before with the power of AI
2023 · debugcode.ai · its alternatives →
- 4
Hi! I've been building a debugger on my nights and weekends because it's fun, and I personally need a better debugger for my work. GDB and LLDB pain me greatly; we can and will do better! As explained in the README, it's still very early-days and it's not ready for use yet, but check back often because it's improving all the time! Check out https://calabro.io/uscope for a more detailed explanation. Thanks for taking a look!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
A simple Python debugger and profiler that generates animated visualizations of program flow, useful for algorithm learning. - CCExtractor/vardbg
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Sidekick▲263Like Chrome DevTools for your backend, now open source
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
CSS debugging tool with an unpronounceable name. Contribute to lucagez/Debucsser development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Hi HN! Korean high school senior here, about to start CS in college. I built a browser engine from scratch in C++ to understand how browsers work. First time using C++, 8 weeks of development, lots of debugging—but it works! Features: - HTML parsing with error correction - CSS cascade and inheritance - Block/inline layout engine - Async image loading + caching - Link navigation + history Hardest parts: - String parsing(html, css) - Rendering - Image Caching & Layout Reflowing What I learned (beyond code): - Systematic debugging is crucial - Ship with known bugs rather than chase…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
A dbg(…) macro for C++. Contribute to sharkdp/dbg-macro development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Hey everyone! I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on throughout my university studies. It’s called BiTE (https://github.com/WINSDK/bite) and it's a tool primarily focused on being an executable viewer with reverse engineering capabilities. BiTE supports Windows, MacOS, and Linux, along with their associated executable formats. It’s also capable of parsing and displaying debug information using DWARF/PDB formats, which I hope will be useful even for just comparing codegen. I’ve put a lot of effort into this and it's the first time I'm releasing something…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hey HN, we're developing Burr (github.com/dagworks-inc/burr), an open-source python framework that makes it easier to build and debug GenAI applications. Burr is a lightweight library that can integrate with your favorite tools and comes with a debugging UI. If you prefer a video introduction, you can watch me build a chatbot here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEZ4oDN0GdU. Common friction points we’ve seen with GenAI applications include logically modeling application flow, debugging and recreating error cases, and curating data for testing/evaluation (see…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
While helping one of my students create and iterate on a game in C using raylib, I realized there was quite a lot of time spent on experimenting with level design and colors, how the player moves, gravity, etc. and a lot of time was wasted making a change, exiting the game, recompiling, running the game, deciding his change wasn't right, and going through the whole cycle over and over. I could tell it was demotivating, and this process was creating a barrier that prevented him from experimenting to his heart's content. I started this project to solve this problem by giving a simple gui to a…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13WM
2025 · npmjs.com · its alternatives →
- 14
CJIT▲83CJIT started as a hobby project around Fabrice Bellard’s tinyCC and slowly grew into something much more practical. It is now a small portable C compiler and runner that works across Linux, macOS, and Windows, can self host, and is packaged as a single executable. What mattered most to me was keeping the barrier to entry low. You can take one small binary, drop it onto a system, and compile or run C code using the libraries already available there, without setting up a full toolchain or installing a large stack of dependencies. I find that useful for quick prototyping, testing, auditing,…
2024 · dyne.org · its alternatives →
- 15
Hey HN, I just built an experimental VSCode extension called LLM Debugger. It’s a proof-of-concept that lets a large language model take charge of debugging. Instead of only looking at the static code, the LLM also gets to see the live runtime state—actual variable values, function calls, branch decisions, and more. The idea is to give it enough context to help diagnose issues faster and even generate synthetic data from running programs. Here’s what it does: * Active Debugging: It integrates with Node.js debug sessions to gather runtime info (like variable states and stack traces). *…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
FlowLens▲134Hi HN, We often run into this with coding agents like Claude Code: debugging turns into copy-pasting logs, writing long explanations, and sharing screenshots. FlowLens is an MCP server plus a Chrome extension that captures browser context (video, console, network, user actions, storage) and makes it available to MCP-compatible agents like Claude Code. You can try it here: https://magentic.ai/flowlens Any feedback—good, bad, or brutal—is welcome.
Dec 2025 · magentic.ai · its alternatives →
- 17
Hello HN community ! Finally I have a "Show HN" post. I'm bootstrapping my first Mac app, it's a standalone Xdebug PHP debugger. It aims to help any PHP developers out there who don't want to use IDE to debug code. My app it's slimmer, faster to load and easy to work and setup :) Hope you guys like it Site: http://codebugapp.com/
2012 · codebugapp.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN, the is Chris, creator of FireDBG. We’ve been working on this debugger just about a year now. Time travel debugging isn’t a new concept, the new idea here is to use call tree visualisation to help us navigate the debug trace. It supports various Linux distros on x64 and macOS on x64 and M1. It’s only available for Rust right now, but we do want to bring this debugging experience to other programming languages. Please give it a try! Would love to know your thoughts. What’s your anecdote in debugging programs? My stupidity is usually in the form of: after a few hours of debugging, I…
2023 · firedbg.sea-ql.org · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20
Sidekick is a live application debugger that lets you troubleshoot your applications while they keep on running. It allows you to add dynamic logs and put non-breaking breakpoints in your running application without the need of stopping & redeploying. Currently supporting Java, Python & Node.js runtimes. Sidekick Open Source is here to allow self-hosting and make live debugging more accessible. Built for everyone who needs extra information from their running applications.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
First single-stepping debugger with everything you wanted
2023 · sentio.xyz · its alternatives →
- 22
The main homepage for ForensicDbg - your new modern crash debugger!
Sep 2026 · forensicdbg.com · its alternatives →
- 23DB
My partner reviews a lot of P&IDs (piping and instrumentation diagrams) and the adjacent files involved (excel, docx, pdfs, acd/l5x, etc). In his company, these are usually done in Bluebeam. It's really hard to see the diff + keep track of all the revisions resulted by these iterations. They end up storing files like "rev3_final_redlined.pdf". We've been looking for something close to Github to do these reviews, but haven't found one easy enough for folks with no CLI experience to understand and use (happy to check out more tools if you know any). So I built withkord.com to help with…
Aug 2026 · withkord.com · its alternatives →
- 24BD
Hey HN, I wanted to show you a product a small team and I have been working on for 4 years. It’s called Jam (jam.dev) and it prevents product managers (like I used to be) from being able to create completely vague and un-reproducible bug tickets (like I used to create). It’s actually really hard as a non-engineer to file useful bug tickets for engineers. I used to write in the ticket that something didn’t work— only to lead to a ton of confusion by the engineer what I meant by “didn’t work”. Was the button unresponsive? Did the page crash? Did it return an error? Or like sometimes I thought…
2024 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →