debug your Deno programs with VS Code Part III — RETURN OF THE FUCKERY 💀

VS Code 1.47 (June 2020) breaks the convenient Deno debugging that was previously described here, in "debug your Deno programs with VS Code — NOW WITH LESS FUCKERY!!!"

The technique described therein works with VS Code 1.46 (and previous), but no longer works in 1.47.

Workaround 0: Disable the debug.javascript.usePreview setting in VS Code. This will re-enable the old debugger which doesn't exhibit this problem.

Workaround 1: Use the shitty-but-working debugging technique described in this newspaper's original Deno debugging article from April 2020, "debug your Deno programs with VS Code". That requires two steps: launch the debugger, then quickly start your Deno program manually on the command line (with the --inspect-brk argument) before the debugger times out.

Workaround 2: Install the last working version of VS Code, from the VS Code May 2020 (version 1.46) release page. (Note that you can name this version "VS Code — Dope Deno Debug 'Dition" and install it along side the latest release — although it does seem that multiple different versions of VS Code cannot run simultaneously without waging horrific and total war against each other.)

more details

Given an identical debug configuration entry like this:

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "console": "integratedTerminal",
      "name": "Debug Deno (Allow All)",
      "type": "node",
      "request": "launch",
      "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}",
      "runtimeExecutable": "deno",
      "runtimeArgs": ["run", "--inspect-brk", "-A", "${file}"],
      "port": 9229
     }
  ]
}

...VS Code 1.46 emits a command like this in the terminal when you hit F5:

That looks right, and does work.

But in VS Code 1.47 the emitted command is:

Now that decidedly does not look right. Not for the purposes of debugging a Deno program, anyway. Where did our magic incantation --inspect-brk go? The --inspect-brk is getting somehow swallowed and not passed on to Deno. Without that, Deno isn't going to pause for us and engage the debugger.

I suspect, but haven't yet proved, that this is related to the "new JS debugger" feature of VS Code 1.47.