winscape 2257
The debugger companion to the gnu toolchain is gdb. It has a number of incarnations, but they appear pretty similar; the differences are those dictated by surroundings.
It has graphical front end, but that is just a pretty pictures job (but it DOES do a good job of displaying complex data structures with lots of typing.) That is right, in addition to symbols there is structure,typing and source reference information in the symbol tables if it is compiled and linked with full debugging on.
It also works pretty well with source code. It is a little more verbose than DDT, but not much. It is mostly a stylistic difference.
I think they achieved fundamental brokenness by accident- by trying to be different and innovative, but not making performance and quality...
It is targetted towads working well with other tools for finding problems; and is not so directly targetted towards making patches. People don't work in buttembly anymore, and an edit-make-install-run cycle doesn't take too long; 4-5 minutes for pretty large code.
The kernel debuggers have a somewhat more limited scope in the symbols and typing they can display. This is why the BSDs have an "external debugger", a kernel debugger runnin on a serial line on computer a, talking to a debugger front end on computer b. The programmer on computer b can control computer a; with symbols expanded and type information handled by the debugger on computer b. The debugger in 'a' just does the basics.
Pretty fancy setup really.
DDT isnt't the reference debugger anymore.
Besides, I spend a lot less programming time in the debugger now; perhaps 2-3% of the time, mostly looking at data structures and invoking functions.
It used to be 20-30% of the time, and a lot more emphasis on looking at the code.
-- mrr
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