An expression can be evaluated in a remote debugging environment with one single round trip across the network. An expression evaluator on a local machine can compile the expression into a language-independent intermediate language (IL) that encodes all the information needed to evaluate the expression in the absence of a symbol table. The IL can include instructions that manipulate state inside the debuggee process, as well as logical operations needed to process the information. The IL language can be turing complete so that any computation needed to determine the state to read and write and how the information gathered is to be combined can be performed. The IL can be sent to the remote computer and can be interpreted on the remote computer. The IL can be interpreted on the remote computer using a stack based mechanism, without the need to access symbolic information on the local computer.