Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, September 01, 2013 17:14:01 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Well, I'm not an IDE person, so I have nothing to say on that front.
> 
> But I will say that debugging can and must be improved. Currently, about
> the only thing usable for dmd -g is to get a stacktrace of a program
> crash. Nothing else seems to be properly supported (I use gdb). Stepping
> through statements and setting breakpoints more-or-less works, but I
> can't get at most variables (keeps complains about being unable to
> reference 'this' or something similar), sometimes variable values are
> outright wrong or completely unrelated to the actual value, sometimes
> variables shown right on the source line being debugged don't exist in
> the debugger ('no such symbol'). Unable to look into nested structs
> without hitting odd behaviour. Doesn't understand D naming conventions
> (or does so poorly).
> 
> Basically, I've given up trying to use gdb on D programs except when I
> need to find out where a crash is happening. Using writeln debugging is
> far more productive, sadly to say. I can imagine this state of affairs
> is quite disappointing to many potential D adopters.

This more or less mirrors my sentiments. I use (g)vim pretty much exclusively, 
so I don't really care about IDEs aside from how they help the community at 
large (your typical IDE's editing capabilites are so much of a joke compared 
to those of vim, that using an IDE really makes no sense for editing - for me 
at least).

However, I would definitely like improved debugger support. I almost always end 
up using writeln debugging except when I need to track down a segfault. Of 
course, gdb support for _C++_ sucks in my experience. It can't understand 
basic stuff like operator overloading. So, I wouldn't expect much from D 
support either - though it would be really nice if gdb could at least 
understand D strings. I certainly wouldn't be opposed to someone writing a 
solid debugger which was D-centric, as it would really improve debugging, but 
I'm not holding my hopes up at this point. That's a major undertaking.

- Jonathan M Davis