CIDER ships with a perfectly adequate debugger if you want it. Might require a bit more manual labour than some environments but you’re never stuck just staring at a stack trace if that’s what’s bothering you.
I think using external dev dependencies and rich dev/user.clj files is pretty common on Clojure projects. Your REPL isn’t just somewhere to interact with the current codebase directly, it’s a framework for building that software and managing its environment more generally.
I need to play with the debugger again.. Does it give you the state along with a crash stack? I remember that unfortunately the debugger couldn't be turned on globally. You need to instrument particular functions. And this turned out to be a major inconvenience in my usecase (a GUI app)
Yeah you’re right, that’s what I mean by manual labour, there’s no ability last I checked to break on any exceptions. But in any case of a reproducible issue you’re not stuck, is all I mean.
I think using external dev dependencies and rich dev/user.clj files is pretty common on Clojure projects. Your REPL isn’t just somewhere to interact with the current codebase directly, it’s a framework for building that software and managing its environment more generally.