2025-05-13

January through May: Finishing the Initial Preview

In the last months, I have continued to slowly work on Native Path Mapping, and am now at a stage where I am testing things out with real projects and code.

The basics seem to work, which is great. But there are some complications with IDEs. Although PhpStorm allows you to associate any file type with PHP, it wouldn't actually allow me to set a breakpoint. I have filed a ticket for that with JetBrains. This is not a problem with the VS Code plugin, which is why I have been using that for testing for now.

I have recorded a teaser video that shows what the current state is too.

This is mostly a recording of me trying things out, and it brought up a few rough edges that need solving — such as realising that "step over" needs to step over multiple lines sometimes.

Beyond these rough edges, I also still need to add more functional tests, and implement the function to allow for parsing extra path map files. It is also very likely I will need to come up with a more comphrehensive file format. I did look into what JavaScript source maps do, but this is based on JSON, which would mean adding a JSON parser to Xdebug, as I can't rely on the JSON extension to be (statically) available in PHP.

I will not have much time during the rest of this month, but will be able to commence working on this from June again.