CLion: Debugging on windows with DMD and LLDB

[Andre Pany]

On Thursday, 9 October 2025 at 15:45:40 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
> Hi,
> as CLion is now free for hobby projects it is quite interesting 
> IDE for me.
> I try to get as much as possible working on a barebone CLion 
> installation on Windows.
>
> - Syntax highlighting for D is easy due to Textmate Bundle for D
> - I registered *.D as as C files in the IDE, this enables me to 
> set a breakoint
>   in a source code line.
>
> - Syntax check and Code completion is at the moment not 
> interesting, Copilot does
>   a pretty good job here.
>
> Now the difficult part. CLion comes on Windows with GDB (MinGW 
> Toolchain) and
> LLDB 9.0 (Visual Studio Toolchain). I assume in theory it 
> should be possible
> to compile an x64 application with DMD and debug it with LLDB 
> on Windows?
>
> Kind regards
> André

My findings:

it works fine by using LDC instead of DMD. The embedded LLDB 9.0 
works in limited way.
The plugin "lsp4ij" also adds support for Debug Adapter Protocol. 
Therefore a recent LLDB (lldb-dap) can be used. The next CLion 
version 2025.3 will also add builtin support for DAP.

=> On windows after downloading LLVM, debugging will not work out 
of the box. The python "Windows embeddable package 3.10.10" needs 
to be downloaded and extracted to the LLVM bin directory.

=> Breakpoints only working with argument -gc

=> By using the DAP, *.d extension also not need to be registered 
as C++ file

Kind regards
André