Could Visual D remember expansion of debug watch variables?

[Michelle Long]

On Friday, 26 October 2018 at 06:28:51 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>
>
> On 24/10/2018 20:47, Michelle Long wrote:
>> Sometimes I have a deep nesting of a variable that I have to 
>> expand many times to find some member to check the variable.
>> 
>> Each time I debug I have to spend about 30 seconds digging in 
>> to the variable in the watch window.
>> 
>> Could Visual D remember the previous run's expansion of 
>> variables and attempt to auto expand them when the next debug 
>> occurs? It would need to scroll to whatever variable was being 
>> viewed last too, and not just percent window in case new 
>> variables were added.
>> 
>> The idea is to sort of make it so that the watch window sorta 
>> of changes as little as possible between runs so no time has 
>> to be wasted each time. It's not so bad most of the time but 
>> in some cases it really adds to the time to debug.
>> 
>
> This is not under control of Visual D, but it is the Visual 
> Studio Debugger Environment that keeps track of the expansion 
> state of locals and watch expressions. AFAICT it doesn't change 
> it if it can reconstruct it while stepping or running to the 
> next breakpoint, but collapses them if an expression cannot be 
> evaluated in between.


Imagine that VS did not keep thee view when stepping, it would be 
a royal pain in the ass! right? Now simply apply that logic to 
re-running the program! it is still a royal pain in the ass, but 
it's just less of a pain since one generally does not re-run as 
much as they step... but it is still the same problem. In some 
cases, specially with D, re-running is required a lot more than 
other programmers and so it is more of a problem.

If VS does not expose any way to deal with this, maybe some hacks 
can be used.

In fact, maybe Visual D can create it's own debugging 
experience(although, then why not just create a new IDE? ;))

Basically create a new window(maybe a VS dockable window) that 
allows for displaying debug stuff better? I really have a need to 
display matrices in a matrix format rather than having to show 
each row one line at a time one column at a time(element wise)... 
makes it very hard to visualize information and therefore makes 
the process of debugging certain things really slow ;/

D really needs a modern IDE with futuristic advanced debugging 
abilities... far too primitive for my tastes.