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Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

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Re: Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

#31

Post by nocman »

kakarot wrote: post #17
pthreads wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I still do, but I used to too. I see what you did there. - Mitch Hedberg

If you are curious as to why you're being downvoted, it's because this comment adds no substance and states something completely obvious. In other words, it was unnecessary. That kind of stuff is for reddit.

If you are curious about why you are totally wrong, his comment was NOT unnecessary, and it DID add substance.

I had never heard of Mitch Hedberg, and therefore did not get the quote, and now I have enjoyed several clips of his comedy routines.

I agree with the pthreads, many people on HN are far too quick to hit the "that stuff is for reddit" button, and could definitely lighten up a bit.

Re: Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

#32

Post by bennofs »

yen223 wrote: post #5

I used to think GDB was a tool with the most broken interface I've ever seen, and which requires arcane commands to do the most trivial of debugging things. I still do, but I used to too. That early dig against Windows was particularly funny. There's no way I would pick that over Visual Studio's debugging tools.

Can you tell me some of the things that VS does much better? I've only ever used GDB, and I am kind of lost when trying to debug a binary on windows

Re: Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

#33

Post by grassfedcode »

cheez wrote: post #28
grassfedcode wrote: post #26

Just wanted to mention gdbgui, a new front end to gdb that I developed which is similar to Chrome's debugger, has a gdb terminal which you can fall back to if you want to run gdb commands, and data structure/value plotting and visualizations similar to ddd. https://github.com/cs01/gdbgui

This looks great! Did you know that you can also use Chrome's debugger to debug Node? I wonder how difficult it would be to use Chrome's debugger as a front end for gdb.

Never tried, but pygdbmi would probably get you halfway there. It uses python to parse structured data (key/value pairs) from gdb output. Gdbgui uses it on its backend. (Disclaimer: I am the developer)

https://github.com/cs01/pygdbmi

Also for golang: https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb

Re: Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

#34

Post by user432468 »

pthreads wrote: post #13
yen223 wrote: post #5

I used to think GDB was a tool with the most broken interface I've ever seen, and which requires arcane commands to do the most trivial of debugging things. I still do, but I used to too. That early dig against Windows was particularly funny. There's no way I would pick that over Visual Studio's debugging tools.

>I still do, but I used to too. I see what you did there. - Mitch Hedberg

https://youtu.be/ndBjraV-3UY

Re: Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

#35

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

The "flipping back and forth" that he seems so impressed with, combined with the arcane key bindings (I know they're Emacs-inspired, but that's little help when the navigation model doesn't actually work like Emacs windows/buffers), is why I dropped TUI pretty quickly. Besides, I have 3 1080p monitors; a UI designed for a VT220 is not the best use of that setup.

It also doesn't help that I've never gotten gdbserver to actually work reliably on my embedded Linux targets (which, to be fair, are not Cortex-A/Apple/Qualcomm chips, so probably being tested by ~nobody). I'd understand if some operations aren't supported due to missing debug hardware or emulation magic, but stuff tends to just start mysteriously breaking (e.g. not stopping on breakpoints, hanging when trying to print memory, crashing on resume/step, etc.).

Re: Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

#37

Post by ustokes »

Agree. I started embedded coding on Linux + Qt-Creator. I have everything working, compiling and running on my ARM and AVR chips, but Debuging jsut does nto work. Just can't find any proper info on how to integrate GDB into Qt-Creator and be able to just Debug like in Visual Studio. If this is not possible, that this endeed is very stupid, starting/stopping servers on a remote target and the rest...

Re: Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

#38

Post by marquis_wyman »

I still think that GDB sucks pretty much. Every time I wanted gdb to do something, I was just lost, I was not able to do it, and eventually gave up. That doesn't mean gdb was not able to do it, it was just that gdb was too complicated and obscure that it was impossible to me to use it. Gdb is not useless, because QT creator as a debugger is quite good, it it just uses gdb. But extending the functionality, like adding a print functions for my own class, just impossible.

Re: Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

#40

Post by jussij »

bennofs wrote: post #32
yen223 wrote: post #5

I used to think GDB was a tool with the most broken interface I've ever seen, and which requires arcane commands to do the most trivial of debugging things. I still do, but I used to too. That early dig against Windows was particularly funny. There's no way I would pick that over Visual Studio's debugging tools.

Can you tell me some of the things that VS does much better? I've only ever used GDB, and I am kind of lost when trying to debug a binary on windows

> I am kind of lost when trying to debug a binary on windows

When I want to debug a program using the Visual Studio IDE I do the following:

1. Start the IDE and open the solution file.

2. Make sure the Debug Build option is selected.

3. Open a given file in the solution that I want to debug.

4. Select a line in that file and use the Debug, Toggle Breakpoint menu to set a breakpoint.

5. Run the debugger using the Debug, Start Debugging menu and wait for the breakpoint to be hit.

6. When that break point is hit just use the debugger to examine the state of the program.

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