Tracing

Debugging in Elixir

When it comes to debugging, Elixir developers have two main options. We can do either of the two:

1. Use the debugger GUI that ships with Erlang

2. The new IEx.break! Elixir tools.

Debuggers let us stop the execution of one or more processes and inspect their environment, but debugging is clearly not a good match for a production system. If we interrupt an important process in our application while debugging, we could start to accumulate requests, leading to timeouts or even restarts. In the end, our email inbox may begin to rapidly fill.