Standard Elisp debugger vs. Edebug

[Marcin Borkowski]

Hi all,

there are two Elisp debuggers built into Emacs: the "standard" debugger
and Edebug.

Edebug seems more powerful and easier to use.

The obvious question arises: is there any reason to use the standard
debugger at all?

My gut feeling is that while Edebug is nicer to use and more powerful,
there might be cases when it doesn't work.  For once, it seems that
there is no edebug-on-error option, and the only (?) way to use Edebug
to locate/examine errors is to manually step to the place where an error
occurs (or set up a breakpoint, temporary or otherwise, near the
suspicious location).  Even then, Edebug won't show me the backtrace,
for instance, and edebugging complicated code (in case I don't know
exactly where the error occurs) might be rather difficult/cumbersome.
So, the standard debugger at least helps to locate the error, and then
I can use Edebug to watch the code "live".  Am I right?

Another suspicion of mine is that the standard debugger is lower-level,
and it might be the case that some code (e.g., macros) will trip edebug
(since you have to use debug declarations in macro definitions - and
what if you have bugs in these?).  I would guess that using the standard
debugger might be easier with macro-heavy code, at least sometimes.  Am
I right?

Are there any other reasons to choose the standard debugger over Edebug?

TIA,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University