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GDB skills are one of those super useful abilities that you just can't find in most CS graduates. I often spend a few days with new C developers just teaching them how to use GDB to find problems. They are amazed when they find out you can examine variables and set conditional breakpoints.
watch -location ptr->member
The visual debugger in both Eclipse CDT and Visual C++ let you do things like create breakpoints, step through your program, monitor variable values, even create conditional breakpoints that are triggered when a particular lineof code is executed n number of times or when some particular expression involving variables in the local context of the breakpoint turn true. My question is, what advantages do you get in usin…
Watching your code run and hitting a "next" button repeatedly isn't really a good use of the tool.
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Depends on the course and instructors. I wrote this as a TA for our Computing Systems class: http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3214/fall2011/projects/esh3-debu... When students came to me for help, my first two questions were always "What does gdb say?" and "What does valgrind say?" If they couldn't answer, I'd tell them to go find out.
Yeah, GDB and Valgrind are heavily encouraged at the University of Michigan in both introductory and advanced classes. Talking to friends at other universities, it seems like most other places encourage it too.
The visual debugger in both Eclipse CDT and Visual C++ let you do things like create breakpoints, step through your program, monitor variable values, even create conditional breakpoints that are triggered when a particular lineof code is executed n number of times or when some particular expression involving variables in the local context of the breakpoint turn true. My question is, what advantages do you get in usin…
One advantage is that gdb might be available in more environments.
In general, whatever you are more comfortable with is the better tool. I prefer command-line interfaces for most things, but find it easier to set breakpoints by clicking next to a line of code.
GDB skills are one of those super useful abilities that you just can't find in most CS graduates. I often spend a few days with new C developers just teaching them how to use GDB to find problems. They are amazed when they find out you can examine variables and set conditional breakpoints.
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Yeah, GDB and Valgrind are heavily encouraged at the University of Michigan in both introductory and advanced classes. Talking to friends at other universities, it seems like most other places encourage it too.
As a student attending the University of Michigan this fall, I was looking through the introductory programming course syllabus and it mentions only ddd. Is gdb something used more heavily in further courses more specific to those pursuing a concentration in EECS?
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This is an area where many college professors fall short. In my intro to CS class we learned C, and the professor explicitly told us to debug our code with printf statements. It wasn't until my first job that I even found out about gdb. I can't believe how much time I wasted trying to debug C and C++ code in college with nothing more than printf and cout.
What makes it even worse is the lack of a REPL means that between each change you need to recompile. In any large program this is going to take minutes and they add up. A simple GDB invocation is not only a better way of tracking it down, but can potently save hours.
GDB skills are one of those super useful abilities that you just can't find in most CS graduates. I often spend a few days with new C developers just teaching them how to use GDB to find problems. They are amazed when they find out you can examine variables and set conditional breakpoints.
Just telling them how to start it and use "bt", "up","down","print", and "cont" would be a huge step forward for most developers... On a related note, it drives me crazy when developers don't know strace/ltrace or the equivalent for their platform. I use strace many times a day to diagnose anything from my own code to figuring out what config files an application actually loads to finding out what's slowing an app do…
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gdb being a utility, I believe the student is generally expected to learn it on their own if they like. Much like version control and other things that make the life of a coder easier, but aren't actually part of "Computer Science".
Yes but I don't even remember being told it existed. My intro to C professor made sure we knew that Vi and Emacs existed and gave us enough information to be interested in learning more; why not gdb? My guess is he probably didn't use it.
The other thing our uni was bad for is that they encouraged us to use vim through the uni servers early on but never have us a proper overview or the resources to really learn it. As a result most saw it as a handicapped text editor that just made things harder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, GDB and Valgrind are heavily encouraged at the University of Michigan in both introductory and advanced classes. Talking to friends at other universities, it seems like most other places encourage it too.
As a student attending the University of Michigan this fall, I was looking through the introductory programming course syllabus and it mentions only ddd. Is gdb something used more heavily in further courses more specific to those pursuing a concentration in EECS?
edit: ddd also has a gdb prompt at the bottom, so you really don't lose much by using ddd over gdb unless you can't run an X server