Elixir debugger crashes erlang on macOS

Question

macOS Big Sur 11.3.1 elixir 1.9.4 erlang 22.0

I am brand new to Elixir and I am trying torun a debugger for the first time. I run my webserver's development environment with iex -S mix and get the interactive elixir prompt. Then I type :debugger.start() and receive an immense output and then erlang crashes.

This is a small snippet, but the actual output is huge.

 == NULL" failed in Register(): Class "wxTextValidator" already in RTTI table - have you used IMPLEMENT_DYNAMIC_CLASS() multiple times or linked some object file twice)?

I have to use the versions listed at the top of the post, the project is version locked. Does anyone have any insight into what is causing this? It may be related to what I had to do to install erlang to begin with . But I'm not sure.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I have never used the debugger, but I believe it relies on some of the same components as the observer. I would recommend installing Elixir and Erlang via asdf -- that makes it easier to install specific versions.

Once you've got things installed, you can use homebrew to install wxmac

brew install wxmac

Then to your mix.exs , add :observer, :wx to your extra_applications , eg

extra_applications: [:logger, :observer, :wx]