A new debugger for Linux - would it work for D?

[John Demme]

Cristian Vlasceanu wrote:

> Hi,
> I have written a Linux debugger (so far targeting C and C++) and from
> conversations with Walter and Andrei Alexandrescu emerged the idea of
> adapting it to support D.
> 
> The areas that might need some not-so-trivial effort are the stack
> unwinding (as I understood from Walter, D sometimes uses stack frame
> layouts that may not be compatible with C) and the expression interpreter.
> 
> Take a look, and if you think the investment in D is worthwhile I will
> give it a shot.
> 
> Thank you,
> Cristian Vlasceanu (http://www.zero-bugs.com)

You would totally be my hero.  I'm the one who wrote (and maintains) the GDB
D patches project... so far it only supports D symbol demangling, and not
even all that well.  I haven't done more since GDB is bloody impossible to
hack (as your website mentions.)

DMD's DWARF output is incomplete (outright wrong sometimes, actually see bug
#146) but GDB frequently can't even handle a lot of D stacks anyway.  I
think Walter will be much more inclined to add more DWARF support (and fix
the existing support) if someone is actually developing a debugging program
for D code and is willing to give him advice on the DWARF format (as I
recall, he wasn't particularly excited about learning DWARF to initially
implement the output.)

In short, if Zero were to get good (or even better- great) D support, I'm
pretty confident nearly every Linux D user would use it, and the Windows D
users would be very jelous.

BTW- I think Zero is a great idea.  I haven't read over the entire web site
yet, but I like it a lot.  GDB sucks!  Choice is great!

Good luck with D.  If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them
personally or feel free to post to the newsgroups here.  The D community
tends to be very friendly and helpful.  You might also check out
dsource.org for some tutorials and interesting D projects.

-- 
~John Demme
me at teqdruid.com
http://www.teqdruid.com/