Christmas request! VD closure debugging

[Rainer Schuetze]

On 14/12/2018 04:21, Michelle Long wrote:
> I've mentioned this before but I am really struggling with this issue
> and it is probably the biggest problem I have with VD + D in general.
> 
> Again, any nesting of stuff (such as functions) or opApply overrides of
> foreach and other cases lose scope of the locals above it(it's globals)
> are lost in the locals, auto, watch, etc....
> 
> This makes it tremendously difficult to debug unless hard aliases are
> created... which uglify the code and must be maintained to prevent
> having to constantly re-add them and remove them.
> 
> 
> You told me that dmd and walter do not think it is a big issue and that
> it is a problem with dmd. If this is true surely you can use your clout
> to get him to change his mind. He doens't realize the headache this
> causes in debugging. The whole point of being able to see the contents
> of variables is at the essence of debugging. Without it the debugging
> experience would be rather pointless.
> 
> I'm not sure what is required and how it can be done much less of the
> exact cause so I implore you to try to convince Walter it is necessary
> for VD to function properly. Surely some compromise could be had. D is a
> very nested language and many times a simple nesting of a function and
> or struct can make all the difference in a problem.
> 
> But even since opApply exhibits this problem, it is very common. I run
> across it even when I am using library code or anything that overrides
> foreach. I actually though I remembered not having this problem a while
> back or I'm sure I would have complained about it from the get go... but
> I could be wrong or just not experienced it much at the time.
> 
> I don't think it would be a hard problem to solve since it really is
> just keeping track of the variables addresses and which ones that need
> to be exposed. But maybe this is not so easy to get working?
> 
> 

Have you tried the latest release with dmd master/nightly? I have added
appropriate debug information to be generated by dmd and added support
for these in mago. It should show variables captured from an outer
function as local variables.