Visual D Debugger "complaints" (Mago?)

[Rainer Schuetze via Digitalmars-d-ide]

On 16.06.2016 02:20, Joerg Joergonson wrote:
> It is pretty hard to visual D's debugger because it is not very helpful.
>
> 1. It generally shows memory addresses for objects. Doesn't do me much
> good. Would be nice to first try a toString() or display the type name.

I guess you are coming from C# where displaying the result of toString 
is more common. The C++ debugger never does this as executing code can 
be harmful. I've added showing the derived type as in C++ just a couple 
of days ago.

>
> 2. Objects are not shown as they are but their base class types. This
> tends to leave a lot of info out of the display.

The new version also allows inspecting the derived class.

> 3. Cannot do a refactored type of renaming. Have to use search/replace
> which isn't great.

Refactorings are not so easy because it can be harmful if it changes 
things too many places. Fixing "Find all references" would be a first 
step...

>
> 4. Cannot execute commands in the debugger watch such as cast(toChild)x;
> (see 2)

You have to name the type with fully qualified type (e.g. 
"pgk.module.Child") for the cast operation as the debugger has no symbol 
lookup information.

> 5. Enums are not shown by name. Do I really have to memorize all the
> values?

This information is not written by the COFF backend of dmd. I need to 
double check with the OMF backend.

>
> 6. A lot of junk information that takes up space. e.g., strings show
> "length=0x00000084". would be better to minimize to 84 and show by name:
> e.g., "This is 84 chars long?"(84)

You get much shorter numbers if you disable hexadecimal display. The 
next version also just prints the string in the "preview" line. To 
actually show length,ptr pair, you can use the raw formatting by 
appending ",!" as with the C++ debugger.

> 7. Line stepping can be weird because sometimes the current line will
> jump to random places then jump back when stepping again. This is
> probably a bug.

That's usually due to bad debug information written by dmd (but not 
always). Please file a bug if you have some reproducible test case.

>
>
> I assume this is due to the mago debugger rather than Visual D but not
> sure(except the renaming ability).
>

Yes, mago and dmd involved.