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The Ruby and Rails community linklog

Made a library? Written a blog post? Found a useful tutorial? Share it with the Ruby community here or just enjoy what everyone else has found!

Quick question: do you know how your Ruby debugger actually works?

https://rubystacknews.com/2026/03/12/choosing-the-right-debugger-tracepoint-iseq-and-why-your-choice-of-debugger-affects-more-than-just-comfort/

Every third Ruby run is a debug run — yet most developers never question which debugger they’re using or what it costs them.

I wrote a deep-dive into how Ruby debuggers actually work under the hood: TracePoint, Instruction Sequences, and why Byebug can slow your program down by 30x just by being attached.

The article covers: → How TracePoint and ISeq power every major Ruby debugger → Why Byebug goes from 17.7s to 529s on the same workload → How the debug gem eliminated that overhead entirely → What RubyMine adds on top for Ruby 2.3+ users → A practical decision guide for choosing the right tool

If you’re still reaching for Byebug out of habit, this one’s worth a read.

#RubyOnRails #Debugging #RubyKaigi #DevTools #FediDev #Programming #Ruby

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