Symmetry Autumn of Code

[Andre Pany]

On Saturday, 14 July 2018 at 06:02:37 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Thanks to the sponsorship of Symmetry Investments, the D 
> Language Foundation is happy to announce the Symmetry Autumn of 
> Code!
>
> We're looking for three university students to hack on D this 
> autumn, from September - January. We're also in search of 
> potential mentors and ideas for student projects. Head to the 
> Symmetry Autumn of Code page for the details.
>
> Spread the word!
>
> https://dlang.org/blog/symmetry-autumn-of-code/

Proposal: Multi IDE debugger support (for windows)

Mago, the debug engine used in VisualD, has also a tool called 
Mago-MI which
has a GDB compatible interface. Therefore you can use on Windows 
Mago-MI as
replacement for GDB.
Several IDEs uses this feature to enable debugging with 1 code 
line for Windows/Linux/MacOS.
It is used in experimental state in IntelliJ, also there is 
support in Visual Studio Code
and of course DLangIDE for which it was originally built.

There are several issues which could be addressed in Symmetry 
Autumn of Code:

- Mago-MI is written in C++. This makes bug solving hard. 
Rewriting of Mago-MI to D might
make sense.

- While the installation of Mago-MI is easy if you want to debug 
OMF executables it is very hard if you want to debug COFF 
executables. You need another executable from Mago,
you have to register DLLs via regserv and you manually have to 
create a registry entry.
An installation procedure for installing Mago-MI would be great.

- There are some bugs in Mago-MI / and DMD (wrong debug 
information) which makes debugging hard. 
(https://github.com/rainers/mago/issues/21, 
https://github.com/rainers/mago/issues/23). Also Mago-Mi misses 
features (https://github.com/rainers/mago/issues/14). There are 
more bugs but not investigated so far.

- As Visual Studio Code is already is already a topic for DLang 
Foundation, using this as reference user of Mago-MI would make 
sense.


While this proposal seems only windows related, the nature of 
Mago-Mi is to enable IDEs having 1 code line for debugging on 
Windows/Linux/MacOS. Therefore overall investing into this topic 
is good for all platforms.

Kind regards
André