DConf 2014 Day 2 Talk 6: Debugging in D by Iain Buclaw

[Manu via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 14 July 2014 21:14, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d-announce <
digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On 14 July 2014 07:22, Manu via Digitalmars-d-announce
> <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
> > On 14 July 2014 15:58, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d-announce
> > <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 14 July 2014 06:19, Manu via Digitalmars-d-announce
> >> <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
> >> > I finally watched it (I failed to survive the long over-nighters until
> >> > 10am
> >> > to watch this one live >_<).
> >> >
> >> > I want to offer congratulation and thanks to Iain for this work!
> >> > For me, this is perhaps the single most important work in the D
> >> > ecosystem
> >> > yet this year, and for me, I think the debugging environment remains
> the
> >> > single most significant hurdle to confident and practical adoption of
> D
> >> > in
> >> > industry.
> >> >
> >>
> >> Thanks Manu.  I guess I'll be having trouble finding the next most
> >> important work in the D ecosystem next year. ;)
> >
> >
> > I think you've probably earned a break ;)
> >
> >
> >> > It brings me to the interesting realisation (which I already knew, I
> >> > have
> >> > just been denying), that for D to proceed on Windows, MSVC will have
> to
> >> > go... and I don't know how to go about this :/
> >> > MS's debugger will presumably never support these features, but the de
> >> > facto
> >> > Windows toolchain emit's PDB for use with the MS tools. I wonder if
> >> > there
> >> > are competing debuggers that support PDB which could support
> unofficial
> >> > extensions to PDB which may express D better?
> >> >
> >>
> >> Zerobugs was aimed at D users back when it was a commercial product.
> >> It has since been released under a boost licensed for a couple years
> >> now, but has into gone into obscurity (I think?).
> >>
> >> Link: http://zerobugs.codeplex.com
> >> Couple of clones on github too: https://github.com/search?q=zerobugs
> >>
> >> Being written against GTK, it's UI should be cross-platform to
> >> Windows, so it *could* be a good base project to start from, then
> >> build Windows debugging support into it.  Someone else will need to do
> >> initial reviewing and triaging of this stuff (we need a new
> >> Lieutenant!)
> >
> >
> > On the back of your work, what advantage would that debugger have over
> > established and more refined tools?
>
> I've never used zerobugs, but it looked interesting a few years back,
> but didn't think it worth the money (actually, I seldom purchase
> software) in comparison to FOSS.
>
>
> > What would a 'D debugger' have to offer when the debug backend
> understands D
> > internally, and can even handle D expression evaluation?
> >
>
> I think the experience is simply more natural to the end user.  You
> code in D, you debug in D.  I do it all the time for C++ when I'm
> probing for a problem in gdc.  Copying a line of code and pasting it
> into the command prompt, checking the result.  It's one of these
> features that I never noticed until I started doing this work in gdb.
> *Then* I realised that I would have to implement a ground-up
> interpreter for D.


Okay, so I'm confused. You said you're working on an expression parser for
D right? Assuming that is present, why would a D-specific debugger have any
advantage over an existing debugger with your GDC?
Or is the point that zerobugs already rolls its own debugger which has an
expression parser?

Luckily GDB has awesome support for many language concepts, both in
> functional and procedural languages.  So most of the work was just
> extending existing opcodes to behave in a D-like manor. ;-)
>

Right.
Do you know about LLDB? I presume it'll be equally competent?
I don't see that GDC/GDB will ever be useful in the Windows environment due
to incompatible object and debug formats, but LLVM are making the push for
full MSVC compatibility. With that, you should be able to (finally!) use
Clang(/LDC) in place of MSVC, so then we're left with the debug
environment... If LLVM are making a commitment to producing Microsoft
object and debug output, it stands to reason that LLDB will support them
too?
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