mago-mi: GDB/MI compatible frontend for Mago debugger

[E.S. Quinn via Digitalmars-d-announce]

Unfortunately in this particular case, CDT's debugging is pretty 
fancy and is going to need most if not all of the MI.

On Thursday, 19 May 2016 at 13:29:14 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> On 19/05/2016 08:41, Vadim Lopatin wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 18 May 2016 at 18:02:12 UTC, Bruno Medeiros 
>> wrote:
>>> While DDT technically work oks with GDB (the GDB from 
>>> mingw-w64 that
>>> is), you are right, there isn't a compiler on Windows that 
>>> supplies
>>> debug info in the way GDB understands. See
>>> https://wiki.dlang.org/Debuggers.
>>>
>>> DMD produces debug info COFF or OMF format, which GDB doesn't 
>>> know
>>> anything about (nor ever will). LDC should in theory work 
>>> with DWARF
>>> info, but this is broken somehow. Not because of LLVM though, 
>>> since
>>> for example Rust on Windows works. As for GDC, it doesn't 
>>> even supply
>>> binaries for Windows (that target Windows) -  it is not a 
>>> supported
>>> platform.
>>>
>>> BTW, Eclipse/DDT should in theory work with mago-mi as well, 
>>> at least
>>> if the protocol is implemented correctly. Have you tried it? 
>>> I dunno
>>> how complete your MI implementation is.
>>
>> So it looks like mago-mi might be helpful for DDT on Windows.
>> mago-mi supports subset of GDB/MI commands enough for 
>> DlangIDE, but it
>> can be easy extended.
>>
>> Currenlty supported commands can be shown using help command 
>> (use
>> --interpreter=mi2 when running mago-mi, otherwise it will 
>> print non-MI
>> commands). Also commands are listed in readme file
>> https://github.com/buggins/mago/blob/master/MagoMI/mago-mi/README.md
>>
>> I didn't try DDT with mago-mi, and so I'm not sure which 
>> commands must
>> be supported by debugger to get it working with DDT.
>>
>> To get list of commands DDT tries to use you can either add
>> --log-file=magomi.log --log-level=TRACE to mago-mi command 
>> line or use
>> debug build of mago-mi.
>> It will all STDIN data to log file, and report errors for 
>> unsupported
>> commands.
>>
>
> I also don't know which MI commands need to be supported to 
> have it work with DDT. The thing is I didn't write the GDB 
> debugger integration for DDT, I just reused the one from CDT. 
> So I'm not that familiar with those internals.
>
> BTW, the MI integration is fairly language agnostic, so in 
> theory your debugger could be used by CDT to debug C/C++ 
> programs too, no? At least those generated by DMC. Maybe Visual 
> Studio ones too?

I'm experimenting with the build of mago-mi that comes with the 
current ~master for dlangide, and it seems to throw an 
unrecognized parameter error when on the --log-level=TRACE 
parameter.

And it seems that the version string it returns upsets eclipse, 
as it throws the following error:

  Could not determine GDB version using command: 
D:\WinHome\<redacted>\AppData\Roaming\dub\packages\dlangide-master\bin\mago-mi.exe --version
  Unexpected output format:

  mago-mi debugger v0.1


Though, from my experience using it in Linux, eclipse-CDT's 
debugger seems pretty full-featured; it will likely require large 
swaths of mi functionality to be fully useful.