this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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What is casting a spell in debug mode?
Can you put a breakpoint in your spell? Picturing a devil having a smoke while the wizard puzzles over all the runes suspended in the air.
Debugging spells is just as much a dark art as spell crafting itself. When I was a young apprentice we didn't have as sophisticated tools as you do now; you had to make sure you noted down your intermediate runes correctly and use those symbols to divine some meaning from the ashes of your failed spell. One time I mixed up my notes with the symbols of a different spell and when I sprinkled the ashes on the stack I was stuck speaking in tounges for a week.
These days of course you can summon a lesser demon to freeze your spell and ask it about the state, but the demons can be tricky and it's easy for novices to make a mistake and allow the demon to run amok - makes a real mess of the lab.
Debugging spells isn't like the fancy debuggers in your modern IDE. You gotta compile the spell with debugging symbols and run it through the spell equivalent of gdb direct in the command line.
But most wizards just go with the ol' "add print statements everywhere" method of debugging.
"Glorfinx's Globular Glassblower" still shouts "HERE!" at max volume when it walks past a wet dog because he never removed the printf rune after he fixed a bug relating to dripping fur.
Oh but the fireworks of Ericas "broader detect magic" became so popular that she actually added back all the spark colors for all the moral edge cases!
We now have novice wizards playing around with exactly how angry they need to be and how gaudy their robes need to be to get the different signals triggered...
The devil knowing if the wizard doesn't get it right, he might get hes breakfast, wizard soul!
printspell debugging.