DConf 2014 Day 2 Talk 6: Debugging in D by Iain Buclaw

[Manu via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 14 July 2014 15:58, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d-announce <
digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On 14 July 2014 06:19, Manu via Digitalmars-d-announce
> <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
> > I finally watched it (I failed to survive the long over-nighters until
> 10am
> > to watch this one live >_<).
> >
> > I want to offer congratulation and thanks to Iain for this work!
> > For me, this is perhaps the single most important work in the D ecosystem
> > yet this year, and for me, I think the debugging environment remains the
> > single most significant hurdle to confident and practical adoption of D
> in
> > industry.
> >
>
> Thanks Manu.  I guess I'll be having trouble finding the next most
> important work in the D ecosystem next year. ;)
>

I think you've probably earned a break ;)


> It brings me to the interesting realisation (which I already knew, I have
> > just been denying), that for D to proceed on Windows, MSVC will have to
> > go... and I don't know how to go about this :/
> > MS's debugger will presumably never support these features, but the de
> facto
> > Windows toolchain emit's PDB for use with the MS tools. I wonder if there
> > are competing debuggers that support PDB which could support unofficial
> > extensions to PDB which may express D better?
> >
>
> Zerobugs was aimed at D users back when it was a commercial product.
> It has since been released under a boost licensed for a couple years
> now, but has into gone into obscurity (I think?).
>
> Link: http://zerobugs.codeplex.com
> Couple of clones on github too: https://github.com/search?q=zerobugs
>
> Being written against GTK, it's UI should be cross-platform to
> Windows, so it *could* be a good base project to start from, then
> build Windows debugging support into it.  Someone else will need to do
> initial reviewing and triaging of this stuff (we need a new
> Lieutenant!)
>

On the back of your work, what advantage would that debugger have over
established and more refined tools?
What would a 'D debugger' have to offer when the debug backend understands
D internally, and can even handle D expression evaluation?

There are alternative tools available for windows too, but I think the key
for Windows developers remains proper integration into Visual Studio, and
PDB support.
I guess the biggest hurdle there is integrating D concepts info into MS's
proprietary PDB format. Expressing debug info like C really won't get us
the full mile.
Rainer bundles Mago with VisualD. I wonder what that's doing lately...
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