Elixir 1.14 Focuses on Debugging With the New dbg Macro

Elixir 1.14 lands in September 2022

Elixir 1.14 was released on September 1, 2022. Like many past releases, it focused on developer experience and developer happiness, this time through improvements to debugging, new debugging tools, and better term inspection.

The dbg macro

The headline addition was Kernel.dbg/2, a new macro somewhat similar to IO.inspect/2 but tailored for debugging. When called, it prints the value of whatever you pass to it, plus the debugged code itself and its location. Because it is a macro that understands Elixir code, passing a series of |> pipes to it prints the value at every step of the pipeline.

IEx stepping and prying

Interactive Elixir (IEx) improved breakpoints to allow line-by-line stepping, and integrated that with dbg/2 through a process Elixir calls 'prying,' where you get access to variables and imports without changing how the code executes. The Livebook team also implemented a visual dbg backend that renders each pipeline step as its own UI element.

PartitionSupervisor and inspection

Elixir 1.14 introduced PartitionSupervisor, a new supervisor type that helps when a single supervised process becomes a bottleneck by supervising multiple isolated copies, each assigned its own partition. The release also changed inspection for structs like MapSet, Version.Requirement and Date.Range to return valid Elixir expressions that recreate the struct, and it took advantage of Erlang/OTP 25 for clearer binary-construction errors.

Related on Skillo

See also: Elixir 1.15 and faster compilation.

Sources

• Elixir v1.14 released (elixir-lang.org)

Published date reflects the original event date (2022-09-01). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.