[Feature] Support direct debugging when using Chakra in VS Code

[harinikmsft]

This issue is copied over from an issue filed in the RNW repo

🚀 Feature request

You can use VS Code for direct debugging when using V8/Hermes, but not for Chakra. This issue is for adding support.

What scenarios will this solve?

The only way to do direct debugging with Chakra is through Visual Studio. Adding support for VS Code would allow developers to pick the tool that better suits their needs.

[RedMickey]

Hello @harinikmsft, @EricCornelson.
We started to investigate how we can attach to a RNW app running in direct debugging mode. We used React Native projects versions 0.62.2 and 0.63.2 with the corresponding versions of RNW 0.62.5 and 0.63.0-preview.4. We launched projects using Visual Studio and then enabled direct debugging and also via the npx react-native run-windows --direct-debugging 9229 command.
Under the hood our extension uses js-debug extension for debugging. We tried to attach to a RNW app using pwa-node scenarios with the application process ID and direct debugging port (e. g. 9229). Both of them didn't work for us:

• js-debug cannot attach to the process via its ID, since it doesn't recognize it as a Node.js process and here we get an error.
• When we were trying to use direct debugging port, it wasn't possible to reach http://localhost:9229 and retrieve an inspector URL. Also the packager endpoint returns just an empty array in case we send the /json request.

It seems that VS uses some other method or additional processing to attach to an application process via its PID.
Could you please tell us if we correctly use the direct debugging port or we something missed and there is a way to retrieve an inspector URL? Could you please also tell us, if it's possible, who we can contact to ask some details about the implementation of attachment to a process in Visual Studio?

[RedMickey]

@harinikmsft, just a friendly ping on this.
Could you please tell us some more info about the direct debugging port? We'd like to know how we can use it, since it's not possible to get any info over the following http requests:

• http://localhost:9229/json
• http://localhost:9229/json/version
• http://localhost:9229/json/list

We also found out that the default inspector URL for debugging Chakra Core is ws://127.0.0.1:9229/runtime1, but it seems that it also doesn't work in this case.

[RedMickey]

Hi @harinikmsft, do you have a chance to look at this?

[harinikmsft]

Hi @RedMickey - sorry for not responding earlier. Since we are working on bringing up Hermes across all platforms including Windows in the next version update with direct debugging, we can deprioritize this ask for Chakra Core direct debugging and focus instead on making the Hermes experience better. Thanks for following up.

[Samriel]

@harinikmsft we are closing this issue until you come back to working on that task. Please, reopen it when the right moment comes.