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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]

#91

Post by ksk »

bennofs wrote: post #85
ksk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it "CLIs are hard" is trivializing it but anyway, it depends on what your common case is. For C/C++, CLIs slow me down tremendously. In an IDE, You don't need to type a single command to view program state (automatic + local + thread storage), call stacks, memory usage, CPU Usage, Heap activity, unpacked C++ containers, GPU state, etc. But this is not even that impressive TBH. FME Windows in general is better…

The symbol thing sounds useful and is something I cannot comment on, since most often I either debug open source programs that I run myself (so I have the binary with compiled with debug symbols) or there is no source at all for the binary (and so no symbols). But, most of the other things you listed are, IMO, quite easy with GDB: > view program state in my experience, your often only interested in a few variables. t…

>This isn't to defend GDB, it cannot do Heap activity or CPU usage or GPU state out of the box and sometimes, a visual interface is nicer. I just wanted to comment on what is possible with GDB, because I was often not aware of that either.

Surely then, the difference between whats possible, and whats easy/default out of the box isn't simply "CLIs are hard" ! :)

Anyway it seems like we'd agree on most things, so nothing really left to discuss.

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

#93

Post by roca »

vidarh wrote: post #83
roca wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try using rr. The combination of reverse execution and hardware data watchpoints enables new, much more direct, debugging strategies to answer the kinds of questions you posed.

rr doesn't work on my CPU yet. Or at least not without building from git, and that fails due to some compilation problem or other. I haven't had time to try much more than that, but from what I can tell from the docs it does seem better though I think at unnecessarily high cost. I already have code that make Valgrind fall over because its state exhausts my memory, so I'l be interested in seeing how rr fares there.

File an rr issue if you have trouble getting it working.

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

#94

Post by pjmlp »

exikyut wrote: post #90
pjmlp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDB already felt like that when we had C++ Builder, Visual C++, Zortech C++ visual debuggers on mid-90's versions of Mac and Windows. The only debuggers that could match them in usability and graphical debugging features were Motif based ones, being sold as a single product.

From a historical-software/UI perspective, I'm curious what that Motif software looks like, and how, er, findable it is. Studying old systems that have fallen by the wayside can often be instructive.

Still found on Aix and HP-UX systems, which are the surviving ones. Solaris dropped it, and all other commercial big iron UNIXes are dead.

You can get some screenshots here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

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

#95

Post by exikyut »

pjmlp wrote: post #94
exikyut wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a historical-software/UI perspective, I'm curious what that Motif software looks like, and how, er, findable it is. Studying old systems that have fallen by the wayside can often be instructive.

Still found on Aix and HP-UX systems, which are the surviving ones. Solaris dropped it, and all other commercial big iron UNIXes are dead. You can get some screenshots here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Woops, didn't notice this till now. I wasn't referring to Motif itself, rather the debugger programs. Contemporary UIs are always interesting to study!

It's awesome that Motif and CDE are finally open source though.

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