New debugger coming soon!

Rainer Schuetze r.sagitario at gmx.de
Tue Aug 10 04:48:38 PDT 2010


Aldo Nunez wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Aug 2010 06:33:50 -0700, awishformore 
> <awishformore at nospam.plz> wrote:
> 
>> On 09/08/2010 06:45, Aldo Nunez wrote:
>>> I'll be posting the D debugger I've been working on at dsource this 
>>> week. It'll
>>> be a set of debugging libraries that you can build your own debugger 
>>> with, along
>>> with a Debug Engine plug-in for Visual Studio.
>>>
>>> I'll post another announcement as soon as it's available.

That sounds awesome.


>>
>> Very nice, sir!
>>
>> Does the plug-in work for all versions of VS? And is it supposed to 
>> work with Visual D?
>>
>> /Max
> 
> It's for D 2. From the beginning I had no intent to make it compatible 
> with D 1.
> 
> The Visual Studio plug-in is for 2005, 2008, and 2010. I haven't looked 
> into if it works for earlier versions.

.NET 2003 seems very similar. Even though you can install Visual D on 
it, I've seen some quirks and did not bother to look deeper into it. I 
would not expect too many users.

> 
> My understanding is that VisualD could easily be made to use this 
> plug-in, instead of the built-in C++ one. It should be a matter of 
> switching the GUID for the Debug Engine used.

Yes, should be easy to do ;-)

> 
> Part of the reason I wanted to make this debugger is that using cv2pdb, 
> although a great tool that helped fill a need, means:
> 1. Relying on the built-in C++ debugger, which means you get a C++ 
> expression evaluator.

I was thinking of building an expression evaluator for Visual D but did 
not get to it yet. Building the whole debug engine looks like a big job 
to me.

> 2. Using undocumented interfaces.

True, that's been a lot of hassle.

> 3. Using Microsoft binaries that might not be redistributable (I'm not 
> completely sure of this).
> 

As the pdb-output is expected to be run within Visual Studio that 
includes the necessary files, that should not be a big problem. For 
other debuggers, you might be right.

4. Using cv2pdb you have to live with some quirks like using '@' instead 
of '.' in fully qualified symbol names. This can be confusing for beginners.

Rainer


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