Debugging support for D - wiki

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 25/09/2013 18:09, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Sep 25, 2013, at 7:46 AM, Bruno Medeiros <brunodomedeiros+dng at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 24/09/2013 07:19, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>> On 2013-09-23 21:50, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>>
>>>> (what about Mac though?)
>>>
>>> The sate of debugging on Mac OS X is worse than on Linux. There are a
>>> couple of problems:
>>>
>>> * D symbols need to be prefixed with an extra underscore
>>>
>>> * The GDB system debugger is very old. It doesn't have the D patches the
>>> upstream GDB has. Apple is using LLDB as the new system debugger
>>> instead, which doesn't have any D patches at all
>>>
>>
>> Ehhh? What's up with Mac OS X and all those outdated operating system managed installations? (I'm referring to the similar issues with had with the JVM)
>> Can't you easily install a newer GDB yourself, outside of Mac OS management? If it can be done even in Windows (with Cygwin or MSYS), surely it can in Mac as well, no?
>
> Probably.  But it would be nice if this worked with the compiler that ships with OSX.  And for what it's worth, "gcc" on OSX isn't GCC any more either.  It's a wrapper around the LLVM C compiler.
>

Why would that be nice? It saves you the small hassle of downloading 
GCC+GDB+GDC into it's own installation. With precompiled binaries for 
your platform, that should take only 15 minutes of your time and then 
you're set (well, a bit again when you want to update). But having 
up-to-date tools with up-to-date functionality far outweights in 
benefits that small hassle.
Or are there downsides to that approach? Does using the GCC toolchain on 
Mac OS X have shortcomings in functionality?  The only reasons I can 
think so far, is if you want to work with LLVM/LLDB specifically (not 
merely because it's the compiler that ships with OSX, but because you 
prefer LLDB over GDB). Or if you want to use OSX specific libraries in 
your D application? (with might somewhat be tied to the OSX toolchain)

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer